The so-called ceasefire in Gaza was a cynical ruse to secure Israeli captives while giving Israel free rein to starve, murder and assassinate Palestinians at will. The world was duped into swallowing yet another Zionist deception, orchestrated by Israel-first Americans, financed with US taxpayer dollars, and drenched in Palestinian blood.
Since the ceasefire was announced, north of 1700 people have been murdered or injured by Israeli fire. In one day this past week, Israel murdered 11 Palestinians in Gaza, including three journalists and children. By the numbers, this ceasefire has been a misnomer, amounting to an average of 17 Palestinians killed or injured every day over the past 100 days. Some were shot or bombed. Babies died more quietly, but no less violently, freezing to death. Infants die of hypothermia not because winter is unforgiving, but because Israel has destroyed their homes and continues to block the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from bringing safe shelters, winterised tents, and adequate housing into Gaza. This is clearly part of a sinister Israeli policy.
Meanwhile, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump remain sanguine, insisting the ceasefire has “held” since early October 2025. One can ask, would they make the same assertions if only ten Israeli Jewish children had been killed? The answer is self-evident. This is plain racism—a blood-soaked moral order, a Western and Jewish supremacist calculus that renders Palestinian babies disposable while using a radically different lens for Jewish children.
At the centre of this deception is the so-called yellow line—an ill-defined military boundary marking Israel’s partial withdrawal as part of phase one of the supposed ceasefire. The yellow line has become a trap, a moving frontier. Israel shifts it in the middle of the night, and mows Palestinians in the sunlight, without oversight and without warning. Palestinians believed the ceasefire meant a chance to return to inspect their damaged homes, recover belongings, or forage for wild plants to feed their children. Instead, they find their homes erased, not in battle, but methodically by an enemy with insatiable hatred.
Parallel to this, aid is not allowed to enter Gaza in accordance with the “ceasefire” agreement. The siege has not been lifted. It was refined. Convoys are delayed. Medical equipment is rejected over technicalities. Fuel, shelter materials, and prefabricated housing are blocked or restricted. Hospitals go without medicine not because of unavailability, but because Israel has revoked the licenses of 37 aid organisations, including Doctors Without Borders, preventing them from sending staff or bringing aid in.
As Israel’s atrocities in Gaza continue, Israeli mobs terrorise Palestinian villages, torch homes, and assault civilians with near-total impunity, and as new Jewish-only colonies expand across the occupied West Bank, Israel is escalating regional tensions with calculated intent. A familiar display of chicanery designed to provoke a wider confrontation—shift headlines, playing the victim, and drowning culpability in the noise of a larger war. To that end, Israel is openly goading a confrontation with Iran in a bid to draw the US into another made-for-Israel war—one to serve Israeli political interests only, while exacting catastrophic costs on the region.
The US remains Israel’s main enabler for laundering war crimes through diplomatic language. Europe’s wishy-washy position is no less cynical. In late 2025, the European Union debated punitive measures, including suspension of the preferential trade agreement over Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law. Those measures were shelved the moment the fictional ceasefire was announced. By halting accountability in exchange for a supposed ceasefire, Israel’s allies granted it another pass. It understood the message, adjusted its tactics, and the violations intensified. Demolitions continued, aid strangled, and children died not only by bullets or bombs, but freezing to death.
Now we hear echoes of Trump’s archetypal diplomatic hubbub, cynically sold to the world as a “Board of Peace.” A “Board” that includes among its membership an indicted war criminal, who skips Davos’ signing to evade arrest and the International Criminal Court (ICC), is not peace, it’s a farce at the highest level. A “Board” supposedly created for Gaza, yet it excludes Palestinian representation and has morphed into a billion-dollar club with lifetime memberships, governed by a charter that cannot even bring itself to name Gaza, Palestine, or any credible path to self-determination.
At the launch of his “Board,” Trump ignored the continued Israeli killing of Palestinians in Gaza. Instead, he dwelled on his fixation with recovering the body of an Israeli soldier and on disarming the occupied. If this inauguration speech is any indication, the “Board of Peace” will be nothing but a performative shell, not a pathway to human justice. What emerges, in reality, is something closer to a Jared Kushner real-estate venture run by a self-appointed dictator with no mandate and answerable to no one.
Palestinians do not need another peace circus. There can be no “peace” that erases Palestinian agency while entrenching Israeli criminal impunity. What Palestinians demand is self-determination and the right to live in a secure, sovereign state of their own. Anything less is not peace; it’s an international management of subjugation and oppression.
What Gaza needs is legal redress for sustained Israeli repression and subjugation. It must be granted unimpeded ingress and egress by land, sea, and air. Gaza must not be condemned to survive as a managed humanitarian dependency, rationed by aid and policed by donors. The international community must reclaim the primacy of international law by allowing the ICC to prosecute indicted Israeli political and military leaders for war crimes and genocide—without American coercion, Western exceptionalism, and moral fraud of double standards.
A ceasefire that leaves infants freezing to death is not peace. A “Board” that grants itself the authority to “acquire and dispose of … property,” while Israel violates agreements in Gaza and Jewish mobs terrorise communities in the West Bank, is just a new phase in the normalisation of mass dispossession and genocide.
Jamal Kanj is the author of ‘Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America,’ and other books. He writes frequently on Palestine/Arab world issues for various national and international publications.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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