On 17 March, two months into a hard-fought ceasefire won by the Palestinian masses, the Zionist regime torpedoed negotiations and relaunched its brutal war on Gaza. 400 people were massacred in 24 hours. In over 18 months of genocidal war the Zionist state totally failed in its stated aim of destroying the Palestinian resistance, despite the murder of more than 60,000 people, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the total destruction of homes, hospitals and infrastructure, and the imprisonment and torture of thousands of political prisoners. Now, with the open encouragement of the racist, colonialist plans of US President Donald Trump, the Zionist state has launched an even more intense onslaught in a desperate attempt to force the Palestinians to surrender, or in the genocidal words of Israeli defence minister Israel Katz ‘face complete destruction and annihilation’. Louis Brehony reports.
While European imperialism and loyal US allies in the Arab world have been shaken by Israel’s blatant trampling of the ceasefire and the scale of the onslaught, Britain’s Labour government continues to stand staunchly on the side of Zionist ‘self defence.’ Reactionary forces internationally are determined to support Zionism’s efforts to liquidate a resistance capable of uniting the popular masses of the world and destroying the racist, warmongering system once and for all. The Palestinian national liberation struggle today stands in the vanguard of the battle against imperialism and the death and destruction it creates. That is why imperialism is so determined to destroy it – and stamp out the international support it has inspired.
Gaza: ceasefire obliterated
By 28 March, the Zionist army had massacred over 700 people across the Gaza Strip. To the deafening silence of the imperialist powers, it blew up Gaza’s only specialist cancer hospital on 22 March. Within the first week of its renewed attack, it issued placement orders on areas housing 15% of Gaza’s population, forcing 120,000 Palestinians to flee.
This trampling on the ceasefire agreement is aimed primarily at destroying the unity, effectiveness and mass popularity of the Palestinian resistance. Zionist Foreign Minister Gideon Saar confirmed from the start that this was not a ‘one day attack.’ As Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri put it, ‘The goals of the Israeli massacres in Gaza are to sabotage the ceasefire agreement and impose a surrender agreement written with Gaza’s blood.’
The Netanyahu government violated the ceasefire agreement over 1,000 times in the first six weeks of its implementation. By 13 March, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that Zionist attacks on Gaza had killed 150 Palestinians and wounded over 600, confirming ‘Israel’s systematic and ongoing targeting of Palestinians in the Strip, carried out with no military justification and in blatant disregard of the ceasefire and international law.’ Violations included the targeting of refugees in ‘safe zones’ and ‘buffer’ regions, with southern Rafah – already flattened by the regime – a particular target. Targeting civilians with a double drone attack, a 15 March Zionist massacre at Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, killed nine Palestinians, including four journalists. A further 10 were confirmed killed in Gaza over the same 48-hour period, including two children sheltering in a tent in Beit Hanoun.
The attacks came two weeks into a renewed Zionist blockade aimed at choking Gaza, cutting off food, fuel and medical supplies, referred to by Euro-Med as ‘a weapon of slow death by starvation’. On 9 March, to the opposition even of Zionism’s staunch EU allies, the occupation again cut Gaza’s electricity, including its only water desalination plant in Khan Younis. On 28 March, UNICEF reported that only 10% of Gaza’s entire population now had access to clean drinking water. Six hundred aid trucks were due to enter Gaza daily as part of the ceasefire agreement: by 16 February this had been slowed to 150 a day by Israeli obstruction. On 13 March UN Special Rapporteur Michael Fakhri described the aid and energy blockade as the ‘fastest starvation campaign in Gaza in modern history’, adding that, ‘This is not a ceasefire by any definition. This is a slowing down of military violence… [but] death through starvation.’ In the preceding year of genocidal warfare, the UN reported that 90% of children aged 6-23 months experienced severe food poverty, along with pregnant and breastfeeding women.
Historically, all the ceasefires grudgingly conceded by the Zionist state have then been subject to the wrecking tactics of a regime founded on colonial violence, with violations ranging from bombings and assassinations to arrests and border closures. By breaking the Gaza ceasefire agreement, the Zionist state expresses its own innate barbarity while seeking to placate its domestic extremists who oppose any pause in the war. Crucially, it reflects both the inability of the regime to terrorise the Palestinian people into submission and the necessity of doing so nonetheless. Coming after months where occupation forces chased shadows in a futile campaign to defeat a guerrilla resistance capable of hitting back across the Gaza Strip, the ceasefire was humbling for the Israeli military establishment. Having demanded a permanent presence in the Netzarim corridor through which it cut Gaza in two, the occupation was forced at least temporarily to withdraw; having declared victory over Hamas-led resistance forces in Jabaliya, Gaza City, Beit Lahia and other locations, the resistance regained control; and despite reducing Gaza’s residential spaces to rubble, families returned in their tens of thousands.
Zionist humiliation was compounded by the public displays of strength through which the resistance managed the release of handfuls of Israeli prisoners, or ‘hostages’, in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian political prisoners released from Zionist jails. As crowds of Israelis watched screens in Tel Aviv squares, they saw armed, uniformed and well-drilled fighters from Hamas and other armed wings of the liberation movement, dictating the methods of release on stages emblazoned with slogans in Arabic, English and Hebrew, proclaiming ‘Palestine – the victory of the oppressed’, ‘We are the day after’ and ‘Revolution against Zionist injustice and criminality’. Far from the images of Israeli victory conjured by the Netanyahu regime, the resistance marched alongside the thousands returning to their neighbourhoods in Gaza. In the weeks following the ceasefire agreement, resistance fighters brandished high-grade weapons captured from slain Zionist troops. In a cross-factional rally on 4 March, a fighter of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) told cameras: ‘Regardless of their ideology, whether progressive, Marxist, Leninist or Islamic… every free and noble person in this world is our ally… We will stand together against the Zionist-imperialist plans for our region.’
Palestinian organisations have constantly reiterated the untrustworthy nature of Zionist pledges. While the occupation violates the agreement daily, it is clear that the conditions that made the ceasefire possible – mounting Israeli casualties, an undefeatable resistance and deepening splits among imperialist and Zionist ruling classes – still endure. US intelligence sources claimed in January that Hamas had recruited around 15,000 new fighters since the beginning of the war. This confrontation is an existential crisis for Zionism, which is why, for a vocal section of Zionist settler society, withdrawing ground troops, scaling back massacres and witnessing public displays of strength on the part of the Palestinian resistance are unpalatable. Mired in a crisis compounded by Lebanon, Yemen and other resistance fronts, the Israeli state is relying on its US imperialist sponsor to help defeat the Palestinian cause.
Terror and resistance in the West Bank
In late 2024, in the run-up to what proved to be a temporary Zionist withdrawal in Gaza, colonialist attacks on the occupied West Bank intensified into overt genocidal slaughter. Waves of violent invasion, assassination and internment have been confronted in recent years by armed and organised Palestinian groups such as the Jenin Brigades and Nablus-based Lions’ Den. Up to October 2023 and the launch of the Zionist genocide in Gaza, the year had already been the deadliest for the West Bank in some years, with 234 people killed by occupation forces. While the January 2025 ceasefire was negotiated, Israeli forces were in the depths of a months-long siege of Jenin refugee camp, forcing thousands to flee. By then, 847 Palestinians had already been killed by Zionist forces and fascist settlers since 7 October 2023.
On 21 January, the Zionist army launched its ‘Iron Wall’ offensive, bringing a new wave of terror to West Bank refugee camps, as ground troops, fighter jets, helicopters, tanks, bulldozers and drones besieged and obliterated neighborhoods and infrastructure. Jenin, known for decades of steadfast resistance to Zionist violence, is at the epicentre of this war. By March, 90% of the camp’s population of around 14,000 had been forced to flee, overwhelmingly descendants of previous campaigns of ethnic cleansing; in January UNRWA had estimated that only around 650 families remained. To date, over 40,000 people in the West Bank have been displaced, including those residing in Nur Shams camp near Tulkarem and al-Far’a refugee camp. At least 70 Palestinians have been killed, most of them in Jenin, Tubas and Tulkarem.
Calls by Zionist extremists to apply the ‘Gaza model’ to the West Bank have been heeded by Zionist military strategists. Katz claimed upon launching the operation that Zionist troops were applying ‘the first lesson from the method of repeated raids in Gaza’, using indiscriminate military attacks and arresting en masse. Reduced to rubble, Jenin now resembles Jabaliya or al-Shati’ camps in Gaza, reduced to a wasteland of mud and debris. One month into the offensive, 365 Palestinians had been kidnapped from Jenin and Tulkarem and imprisoned. Jenin camp was, by now, ‘nearly uninhabitable’, according to UNRWA spokespeople. Like Gaza, schools in Jenin have been turned into displacement shelters, with the camp reduced to a ghost town. The destruction of refugee camps, as centres of the most oppressed and therefore the most likely to resist, is not a new phenomenon. As PFLP leader Marwan Abdel-Al told FRFI in 2023, Zionist campaigns in Lebanon during the 1970s totally destroyed and displaced multiple refugee camps, including Tel al-Za’tar, Jisr al-Basha and al-Nabatiyyeh. Other camps swelled in the aftermath of these massacres but, despite the terror, backed by Lebanese fascists akin to the Zionist settlers of the West Bank, the operations failed to destroy the power of Palestinian organising.
As in previous confrontations, the comprador Palestinian Authority (PA) has proved itself a force of collaboration and reaction. Two of those killed during the Zionist offensive on Jenin were shot dead by the PA. On 10 March, Abdelrahman Abu al-Mona was shot three times in the back, becoming the 21st Palestinian to be killed by the PA since 7 October 2023; 16 of these were killed in Jenin. On 24 March PA forces arrested Ahmad Suwaiti Zakarneh, the latest in a line of internments of activists wanted by Zionist forces. Reporting on a raid on her house in Jenin, Umm Ahmed reported that PA forces ‘stormed our home two hours before suhoor [early morning meal during Ramadan]. We thought they were the occupation army’. Umm Ahmed and her teenage daughter were physically assaulted and her son and husband arrested by PA troops.
Tubas brigade commander Mohammed Abu Dawas, who was killed by the Israeli occupation forces, was among many former PA security troops who quit their jobs in protest at PA collaboration. Despite this, the PA attempted to claim him as a martyr of their own. His mother responded on 13 March: ‘No one who works with, collaborates with, or supports the Authority is allowed to attend my son’s funeral.’ The whole region is in foment, with settler attacks and army incursions met with protest and armed resistance. Zionist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has promised that the occupation will annex the West Bank in its entirety to the state of Israel this year, anticipating support for this plan from the Trump administration. By continuing to attack the Palestinian masses, the PA regime is bidding for involvement in the imperialist dream of a West Bank free of opposition or struggle.
Trump’s plan for ethnic cleansing
During a 4 February Washington press conference with Netanyahu, while the ceasefire still held, Trump announced that the solution to the Palestinian ‘problem’ would be direct imperialist colonisation. Under his watch, the US would ‘take over’ and ‘own’ Gaza. His blatantly colonial, racist plan openly called for over 2.2 million Palestinians to be ‘resettled’ in the region, with Egypt and Jordan named as countries the US would pressure to take them in. Trump donned white saviour garb and claimed that Gaza was a ‘bad neighbourhood’ beset by wars, correctly pointing out that the Strip had been reduced to rubble but claiming that Palestinians’ ‘chance to live in peace’ could only be found elsewhere.
The same Zionist extremists who have long harboured ambitions to annex Gaza to the Israeli state now embraced Trump’s proposal for an ethnically cleansed US Riviera. Netanyahu hailed its ‘revolutionary significance’, while finance minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the creation of a ‘migration administration’ to make the plan for mass expulsion a reality. Telling the Knesset that budgets would be no obstacle, Smotrich brazenly announced: ‘If we remove 5,000 a day, it will take a year… This is a huge logistical operation – not just the bus that takes them, we need to know who is going, to which country, what ages, vocational training, a huge operation, we are preparing.’
A Hamas statement on 11 February pointed out that the racist statements of Trump were aimed at ‘liquidating the Palestinian cause and denying the established national rights of our people.’ Recognising that most ‘Gazans’ are historically displaced Palestinians from regions colonised inside the green lines of the Zionist state, Hamas declared: ‘We say to the entire world: No migration except to al-Quds [Jerusalem]. This is our response to all calls for displacement and liquidation made by Trump and those who support his colonial, occupation agenda.’
British Labour politicians made token efforts to distance themselves from Trump’s position, while offering the same tired phraseology on Israeli security and two-state solutions that it always comes up with to mask its unconditional support for Zionism. A day after Trump’s proposal, Labour Foreign Secretary David Lammy said that ‘Trump is right’; just hours before Israel’s 17 March return to genocidal warfare, Lammy repeated the line that ‘Israel quite rightly must defend its own security’. During the ceasefire Prime Minister Keir Starmer had reiterated to the House of Commons that the Israeli hostages remained the priority. Responding indirectly to Trump, Starmer said Palestinians ‘must be allowed home… and to rebuild, on the way to a two-state solution.’ This return ‘home’, of course ignores the fact that most Palestinians in Gaza were expelled from ’48 Palestine, and denies their right of return to lands colonised by the Zionist state.
EU imperialists were unequivocal in their opposition to Trump’s proposal. Further highlighting the inter-imperialist rift, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said that ‘An expulsion of the Palestinian civilian population from Gaza would… be unacceptable and contrary to international law’. The French foreign ministry said the US plan constituted ‘a serious violation of international law, an attack on the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians’ and called for Gaza to be ruled by the EU-funded and trained Palestinian Authority. None of these EU countries have, of course, stood with Palestinians, instead representing the neocolonial strategy of backing the PA as a partner to Zionist counterinsurgency operations.
The Trump plan was totally unpalatable to the Arab bourgeoisies, and particularly to the Egyptian and Jordanian ruling classes. It succeeded in spurring the Arab regimes into swift action, galvanising regional states against Palestinian displacement and the direct colonisation of Gaza. At the conclusion of an Extraordinary Arab Summit in Cairo on 5 March, participating states adopted the Egyptian plan for the reconstruction of Gaza. Pledging $50bn, the plan’s endorsers directly countered the Trump plan by opposing the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. According to the Egyptian President Sisi, Gaza would be ruled by a ‘Palestinian administrative committee of independent professionals and technocrats.’ The details of this proposal remain unclear and include the suggestion that the PA be invited back into Gaza. British and EU imperialists have expressed their support for the Egyptian plan.
By 12 March, Trump appeared to accept defeat during a press conference with the Irish Taoiseach Michael Martin, stating: ‘We are not expelling anyone from the Gaza Strip.’ In the deepening crisis of US imperialism, the seemingly tendentious policy whims of the Trump regime carry an unpredictability, but his plan was always a fantasy. Sections of the Palestine solidarity movement have viewed Zionist phenomena such as the (real) expansion of its occupation of Syria and its (imagined) ability to conquer southern Lebanon as evidence that a ‘Greater Israel’ is in the offing. In the first weeks of the genocide, fascist settlers openly called for the recolonisation of Gaza and, later, Zionist newspapers gave space for arguments that ‘Lebanon is Israel.’ But, as with Trump’s failed colonial venture, standing in the way of such far-fetched dreams are the Palestinian masses and their resistance. In Gaza, the occupation could not get past northern Beit Lahia and Jabaliya, despite making them unlivable, while Lebanon’s southern villages proved insurmountable.
As the Zionist state dragged its heels over moving to the agreed second stage of the ceasefire and the withdrawal of Zionist troops, Trump issued a ‘last warning’ to Hamas. On 6 March, he gave 48 hours’ notice and threatened that if the resistance did not release ‘all of the hostages now, not later’ it would be ‘over.’ Israel would be given ‘everything it needs to finish the job’ of killing all ‘Hamas members.’ The deadline passed and it emerged that US negotiators had reached out directly to Hamas. But it is clear that the imperialists remain determined to furnish the Israeli state with ‘everything it needs’ in a further effort to crush the resistance. On 2 March, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio approved the sending of 2,000-pound bombs as part of $4bn in new weapons to the Zionist regime, the second time in a month that he had bypassed Congress to do so. Upgrading the machinery of the Zionist junta runs parallel to imperialist bombings of Yemen, where Trump – backed by British air forces – threatens to ‘annihilate’ Ansar Allah. While bourgeois Arabs collaborate with imperialism and its Israeli client, the resistance of principled allies of the Palestinian struggle represents a real threat to imperialist plans for the region.
Denigrating and then smashing the ceasefire marks a return to Zionism’s founding methodology. Without British imperialist backing and direct occupation after the 1917 defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the Zionist scheme to colonise Palestine would have remained the pipe dream of a few extremists. Britain’s stated mission was for a ‘loyal little Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’, according to colonial governor of Jerusalem Ronald Storrs. This carried the recognition that imperialist rule of the region would lead to resistance. In 1936-39, the Palestinian revolutionary movement was put down mercilessly by British forces and the Zionist paramilitaries they trained, paving the way for the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba. US imperialism supplanted Britain’s dominance but the mission remains: policing and pacifying the region for imperialist domination means liquidating the Palestinian revolution.
What motivated Storrs and early Zionist colonisers like Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion preoccupies Zionism and its imperialist backers today. Their colonisation was then predicated on the British imperialist view promoted by the infamous Lord Balfour that Palestine should be colonised in its entirety; this Labour-backed onslaught did not hide behind phraseology on two-state solutions.
Zionism’s final solution
What the current manoeuvres of imperialism and its allies, from the reformist compromise of the Egyptian plan to the hellfire the Zionist state is raining down on Gaza, reflect is their increasing desperation in the face of a stubborn reality: the refusal of the Palestinian people to give up or compromise their struggle for liberation at any cost.
This is the context of the renewed Israeli offensive in Gaza and its continuing siege in the West Bank. Following on from Donald Trump’s threat to Hamas that ‘there would be all hell to pay’ unless it handed over the Israeli hostages immediately, the Zionist state has been bombarding the entirety of the Gaza Strip with leaflets carrying the same chilling message of total extermination. ‘The world map won’t change if the people of Gaza were to vanish’, says one; ‘no one will notice you, no one will care about you’, reads another, making it clear that Israel will move to forcibly disperse the entire population no matter what. On the other hand, the leaflets promise that Gazans who ‘cooperate’ with the occupation forces can expect a financial reward. Israel Katz, who has threatened the ‘annihilation’ of the Palestinian people, has said his forces will seize more land and expel more Palestinians unless ‘Hamas is removed from power and the Israeli hostages freed’. At the same time, the mainstream media, including The Guardian and the BBC, have seized on protests against the genocide in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, in order to gleefully amplify the few voices among the demonstrators opposing Hamas. These are attempts to support the Zionist state’s goal of driving a wedge between the Palestinian people and the popular armed resistance. At the same time, within the imperialist countries, there is a ratcheting up of repressive tactics against those who support the Palestinian liberation movement. The aim is to criminalise the very right of an occupied people to fight back by all means at their disposal, including through armed struggle.
But it is clear that the people of Palestine continue to stand, in their masses, behind those leading the resistance, who have refused point-blank any suggestion that they should disarm, dissolve or evacuate from Gaza. The united armed resistance represents the first line of defence for the Palestinian masses. Their right to that resistance must be defended by everyone demanding a free Palestine.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 305 April/May 2025
