‘Aceasefire in the Israeli genocide in Gaza has been formally declared. All of Israel’s goals have been thwarted—no Nakba 2, no ethnic cleansing, no ending the Palestinian cause, no destroying the Resistance. Israel has learned that its military superiority, backed by the United States, can no longer guarantee victory or political outcomes.’ – Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle
At the end of January 2025, in inspiring scenes of defiance and joy, half a million displaced Palestinians streamed back into northern Gaza under the protection of armed Hamas fighters. Singing, chanting and making victory signs, after 15 months of genocidal Zionist bombardment and an intention to ethnically cleanse the region, the Palestinian people returned to reclaim their land. Despite the devastation wrought by Israel and the manoeuvres of its imperialist backers, this new march of return was a powerful symbol of ongoing Palestinian resistance against occupation and for national liberation.
Ceasefire
This return was one of the conditions of the three-phase ceasefire agreed between Hamas and Israel that began on 19 January. The first phase includes the release of around 1,900 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 33 Israeli captives held by the liberation movement in Gaza; the withdrawal of Israeli forces from populated areas in Gaza; the entry of aid; and the continued stationing of the Israeli military along the border. A private US company will run a vehicle checkpoint on the so-called Netzarim corridor following the Israeli withdrawal; the company will be using former special forces working alongside Egyptian special forces. If the ceasefire holds – and many Zionist politicians have made clear their eagerness to return to war – phase two will include a permanent ceasefire; the release of more Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the remaining living Israeli captives; and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces. The final phase includes the transfer of the bodies of dead Israeli captives and the beginning of the reconstruction of Gaza.
The ceasefire forced on the Zionist state – which twice over the last year rejected a similar deal, at a cost of thousands of Palestinian lives – was first and foremost a result of unwavering Palestinian armed resistance and the two million Palestinian people who remained rooted to their land. Right up to the final hours, the resistance movements continued to inflict losses upon the Zionist armed forces in all parts of Gaza – including the north, which Israel repeatedly claimed to have subdued. Within minutes of the ceasefire coming into effect Hamas fighters took to the streets of Gaza, weapons in hand, to show the world that they remained undefeated by one of the region’s most sophisticated military powers. Footage of the release of Israeli captives showed the Hamas-led resistance as disciplined, in control and very obviously undefeated – and gave a glimpse of the level of popular support it enjoys. That Israel accepted the deal was also the result of unprecedented pressure by its main backer, the United States, which understood this was a war Israel could not win, and – faced with a sustained international solidarity movement that would not allow the horrors of the Zionist slaughter to be brushed aside – needed the immediate genocide to end in furtherance of its future ambitions for the region.
The Zionist state has failed in its stated aims of crushing the resistance, ending the Hamas governance of Gaza, decanting the population and forcibly retaking the hostages. On 14 January, then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that ‘Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost’, adding that this was a ‘recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war’. The Times of Israel carried the headline: ‘For the first time, Israel just lost a war’.
Israel is a settler-colonial state, artificially created and maintained on Palestinian land through the support of British, US and EU imperialism. Without this economic, financial, military and diplomatic support, as the Jordanian-Palestinian academic Joseph Massad argued a month before the ceasefire, ‘the settler-colony would collapse in a matter of months’. While still president-elect, Donald Trump sent his Zionist Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff, to force Israel to accept the terms. But there should be no illusion that, for the United States, the Gaza genocide represented anything other than an embarrassment to its wider plans for the region. Trump stands squarely behind the Zionist project: in a quid pro quo for an immediate ceasefire, the US has given the green light for illegal settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank (see page 3). Trump has renewed shipments of the 200lb bombs that were used to devastate Gaza and signalled clearly his support for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territory: ‘You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say, “You know, it’s over”’.
Devastation in Gaza
The determined return of Palestinians to northern Gaza shows incontrovertibly that their struggle is far from over. But footage of the places to which they are returning also shows the utter annihilation carried out by Israel in its genocidal war. From an open air prison, Gaza has been turned into a mass graveyard, with bodies still buried under the ruins. A landscape of grey rubble and twisted metal extends as far as the eye can see. The scenes are reminiscent of the aftermath of Britain’s aerial bombardment of Dresden during the Second World War. Over 15 months, the Zionist state:
- launched three times more firepower on Gaza than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, leaving more than 42 million tonnes of rubble which will take decades to clear;
- pounded entire cities to dust, street by street, building by building, carpet-bombing hospitals, schools and homes.
- destroyed or damaged around 92% of housing units, with entire neighbourhoods wiped off the map. This includes 70% of northern Gaza, 74% of Gaza City, 50% of Deir El-Balah, 55% of Khan Younis and 48% of Rafah obliterated. The UN has stated it could take more than 350 years to rebuild Gaza if the nearly 20-year-long blockade remains.
- destroyed healthcare, water and sanitation systems and 88% of schools and 68% of road networks.
- eradicated more than 70% of olive trees and groves; 95% of cattle and more than half of sheep and goat herds have died.
Already in July 2024, The Lancet estimated the death toll in Gaza could reach more than 186,000 people. More than 70% of those killed have been women and children. The long, long list of Israel war crimes includes:
- deliberately targeting hospitals, and setting tents and field hospitals ablaze, killing 1,000 medical workers; babies in incubators and those on life support died after electricity supplies were destroyed.
- shooting people as they queued to receive humanitarian aid.
- using starvation as a weapon of war against civilians.
- bombing essential infrastructure, including water and electricity supplies. At least eight very young babies froze to death in Gaza in December 2024 because of the cold.
Videos abound of war-criminal Israeli soldiers celebrating their massacres and desecrations. Mass graves have been uncovered. Prisoners were taken, stripped, beaten, hooded and handcuffed, then left to kneel on the ground for hours in the soaring summer heat. Many then disappeared, some of them into Israel’s torture prisons. Images of Palestinian prisoners, some of them children, emerging from Zionist jails malnourished and brutalised is an indication of the horrific conditions in which they had been held – in contrast to the young Israeli female soldiers and others released so far by Hamas. Meanwhile, diseases like polio have returned and the very air and soil are poisoned by heavy metals and asbestos from Zionist weapons. This is the legacy of genocide. This is what Labour politicians like Keir Starmer and David Lammy are supporting when they speak of ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’.
But despite the best efforts of Israeli hasbara propaganda and imperialist politicians and their media, Zionism’s crimes have been laid bare before the world. The pressure of international solidarity has stripped away Israel’s façade of being ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ and defender of human rights. For the first time in history, Israeli politicians are being held accountable for war crimes on the global stage. In November 2024 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice. Cuba is the most recent country to join that case. The UN General Assembly has called on Israel to immediately end its occupation of the Palestinian territories seized in 1967. It is the task of the solidarity movement to ensure there is no let-up in holding Israel to account, no normalisation of Zionist genocide and the immediate withdrawal of US forces from Gaza.
Mark Moncada
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 304 February/March 2025
