By Robert Inlakesh
Massive destruction in Jabaliya, northern Gaza. (Photo: via QNN)
Israel is not actually implementing the ceasefire; instead, it is taking a break from some of the more taxing combat missions in Gaza and toning down its bombing, something that it has done at different periods during the genocide.
Calling what is currently taking place in the Gaza Strip a ceasefire is, by definition, incorrect. Israel has not ceased fire; instead, it has continued its military operations while reducing the intensity of the fighting. Meanwhile, the so-called “International Community” is working on a conspiracy to step forward and take command of the genocide.
Since the ceasefire was said to have gone into effect, the Israelis have violated every commitment they had pledged to adhere to. Despite this, we are still being informed through the corporate media that the war is allegedly over.
In order to draw conclusions about what is currently underway, it is important to first establish the facts, which can lead to a thorough analysis of what is transpiring on the ground.
Ceasefire Violations Expose Israel’s True Agendas
Before addressing violations, it is integral to any analysis of Gaza’s current predicament to make mention of the so-called “Civil-Military Coordination Center” (CMCC) established shortly after the October 8 agreement was inked.
The CMCC is supposed to be the committee that monitors and helps to enforce the ceasefire agreement. Although it was initially said that setting up the CMCC would take at least 17 days, within the first 5 days of the ceasefire agreement, it was up and running.
Instantly, 14 countries and over 20 non-governmental organizations joined the CMCC, with others joining in later. Although it may appear to be a project with a positive goal, it has been a complete and total failure through and through.
On October 19, the Israelis killed 44 Palestinians after their own forces ran over an unexploded ordinance, which they subsequently blamed on Hamas. The Associated Press (AP) reported that day that Israel had not violated the ceasefire, but had posed a “test” to it.
To give the CMCC the benefit of the doubt, one could plausibly argue that behind closed doors, its member countries and NGOs may have exerted pressure on the Israelis following this event.
However, on October 28, the Israelis decided to mass murder 104 Palestinians in Gaza, around half of whom were women and children. For all intents and purposes, this day was a return to the scale of destruction that was present throughout the genocide.
In this instance, did any nation or NGO withdraw from the CMCC in protest? Was there a coordinated effort to impose consequences on the Israelis for their actions?
If one sought to give the benefit of the doubt even in this scenario, arguing perhaps that the CMCC may be playing the role of simply ensuring the ceasefire doesn’t totally collapse, this still makes no sense. This is because part of the ceasefire is the issues of reconstruction, aid entry, Israeli withdrawal, the cessation of military operations, and stopping the killing.
On every issue concerning the Palestinian civilian population, the CMCC has not only failed, but the committee itself has watched on and is fully aware of what is occurring on the ground. In addition to this, the CMCC multi-national hub is based in southern Israel and is therefore not on neutral grounds; it is there with Israeli permission and, no doubt, a level of supervision.
When it comes to the entrance of humanitarian aid into Gaza, an average of around 90 trucks were permitted entry by the Israelis in the first few weeks of the ceasefire. According to the agreement, Israel had pledged to allow for 400 trucks to enter per day for the first five days, agreeing to unlimited amounts of aid flowing through after this.
The minimum required to meet Gaza’s needs is 600 trucks per day. On this issue, there is no other conclusion that can be drawn other than to accuse the CMCC of complicity or that it is a failure. If it is a failure, then the natural follow-up question becomes: Why is the committee growing, and there are no solid measures being taken to hold Israel to account? Or, at the very least, why is nobody resigning from the role in protest?
Next, we have the issue of reconstruction. According to Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, they are backing a scheme whereby reconstruction will not take place in areas where Hamas is still based. In other words, they will implement an Israeli proposed scheme, as initially reported upon in Axios News, to use reconstruction funds to build only behind what is known as the ‘Yellow Line’.
The Yellow Line is the zone demarcating the areas controlled by Hamas and Israel. The Israelis were supposed to withdraw to this line and remain only in 53% of Gaza. Instead, they quickly violated this portion of the agreement and are operating hundreds of meters beyond this point, as verified by satellite imagery. Israel is in reality occupying up to 58% of the territory.
Inside the territory the Israelis occupy directly, they are continuing their daily demolition operations against the remaining Palestinian civilian infrastructure there. This is a flagrant violation of the ceasefire, which is evident through Israeli soldiers posting videos of themselves destroying homes on social media. Again, where is the CMCC in all of this, let alone on the question of the daily killing of civilians and bombings?
Under Donald Trump’s 20-point plan, he seeks disarmament of the Palestinian factions. If you look at the rest of the nations involved in the so-called monitoring and enforcement effort, they all voted in favor of the New York Declaration’s proposal for a Two-State model and ceasefire. The UN General Assembly vote reflected an agreement on disarming and drowning out non-State actors.
So why then are the CMCC nations not sounding the alarm over Israel’s continued military backing for four separate ISIS-linked militia groups operating behind the Yellow Line? These forces cannot take over Gaza and are hated amongst the entire population, who were not only subjected to their indiscriminate violence, in addition to the looting of their homes, businesses, and hospitals.
These militias actively receive orders from the Israeli Shin Bet and army; they are also responsible for looting the majority of the aid trucks heading into Gaza since May of 2024, under Israeli protection and monitoring.
Nothing is being said about how to combat these gangs, composed of Salafist militants who are affiliated with ISIS and Al-Qaeda, along with bans on convicted murderers and drug dealers. On the part of Western media, the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have even published op-eds, purported to have been written by the ISIS-linked militia members themselves.
Yet, when it comes to holding Hamas to account and achieving the portions of the agreement that benefit Israel, the CMCC is ready to play ball and take action. As a measure to ensure the ceasefire is being enforced, Egypt sent teams of specialists into Gaza to help search under the rubble for the bodies of dead Israeli captives. The US has also sent hundreds of troops as “advisors” and deployed reconnaissance drones over Gaza.
All of this alone demonstrates that only the Israeli side is being prioritized, while Palestinians are not only killed on a daily basis by direct fire, but through deprivation of essential medicine and goods, in addition to the refusal to allow the sick and injured to leave for treatment.
The ‘Ceasefire’ Agenda is Now Becoming Clear
What is currently happening is that Israel is being allowed to take a glorified pause from its full-scale military operations that it had previously committed itself to in Gaza. In an interview for Israel’s Hebrew-language Channel 14 News, the plot is discussed by Reserve Brigadier General Amir Avivi.
Avivi argues that behind what is labeled a “temporary calm”, there are many complex political and security moves being taken by both the Israeli and US governments. “Trump and Netanyahu are working simultaneously on the international force, in which there will be no Qataris or Turks, and also on regional peace agreements. Because everything is intertwined in this, everything is slower. It is being done step by step”, he stated.
Some of these schemes may be kept private from the public eye, yet enough of them have been exposed piece by piece, enabling us to be able to put together an educated analysis of what is really going on.
For example, the International Security Force (ISF), which the Trump administration has been advocating for, was exposed by Vice President JD Vance himself when he explicitly stated that they would be tasked with disarming Hamas.
The ISF plan is still incredibly vague in terms of how it would be actually implemented, yet it should be noted that projects like the failed American floating aid pier and the PMC-led Gaza Humanitarian Foundations (GHF) were rolled out without thorough planning, resulting in mass death and destruction.
What we do know about the ISF is that everything it does will have to receive approvals from the Israeli military and operate within its framework. So immediately, it is a pro-Israel force that is not impartial, and we know from what’s been reported upon that the US and Israel are adamant that the ISF will not act as a Gaza version of UNIFIL in southern Lebanon.
Israel is also clear that no Qatari or Turkish forces will be deployed as part of this ISF. A number of unnamed Arab nations have reportedly withdrawn their pledges to commit forces to the ISF, also reportedly leading to the US approaching more East Asian nations to replace them. The main concern is the lack of clear direction for the force, the precarious security situation, and that these soldiers will likely be forced to fight Hamas.
The ISF, in other words, is an international regime change force that is planned to be an invading army, tasked with carrying out Israel’s dirty work. Interestingly, however, the likes of Israeli Reserve Brigadier General Avivi believe that the scheme will not work and that instead the Israelis will be forced to return to attacking Hamas.
Avivi himself mentions that the pause is being used by the Israeli army to repair its tanks and that “the Chief of Staff has long asked the government for time to work on the tanks, on the tools. After two years of fighting, the tools are worn out. They want to refresh the forces, consolidate the defense line.”
With or without the ISF regime change force, the Israelis are still working on a range of different plans for the Gaza Strip. As mentioned above, Israel’s military operations behind the Yellow Line have not stopped, and this territory is being reinforced with security equipment and cement blocks to demarcate the zones.
What Tel Aviv is seeking is to create two separate Gazas. One, which will be under the de facto rule of Hamas and the Palestinian resistance, and the other, which is under Israeli occupation and also the ISIS-linked militias it uses as proxies. So far, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is the only known outside entity to have thrown its weight behind these ISIS-linked gangs; however, they were used to coordinate with the GHF mercenaries.
Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff appear to have given Israel’s Two-Gazas Solution the green light, making it clear that no reconstruction will happen except in the territory controlled by Israel and its ISIS-linked proxies.
The only problem that the Israelis face with this strategy is that all of Gaza’s civilian population are along the coast in the areas controlled by the Palestinian resistance, and they will not move willingly. The only civilians living in the Israeli-controlled territory are some family members of the aid looting militia collaborators.
Therefore, the Israeli military is proposing a range of solutions to cleanse the population and force them into this “new Gaza” zone. One of those proposals involves aid distribution, in particular the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was the privatized machine implicated in the mass murder of over 1,000 civilians, who were lured to the distribution sites and picked off by snipers for sport.
Israel’s idea is to continue restricting the aid from entering areas where Gaza’s civilian population lives. They may eventually shut off all aid, or slowly reduce it if their strategy begins working. On the other side of the Yellow Line will be aid distribution points run by the GHF, which the people will be forced to go to in order to simply survive. This project has not been fully mapped out as of now, but all the reports point to this being the case.
Another part of this displacement project, which has been openly discussed in the media, as mentioned above, is that Palestinians will be offered to live in areas where some reconstruction is happening, sites that will be concentration camps.
The alternatives will be for the civilian population of Gaza to stay in the areas controlled by Hamas and to starve, or continue living in tents with less than the bare necessities.
If we look back at different phases of the genocide, this plan mirrors aspects of a number of similar schemes, all of which failed. For example, the GHF was supposed to result in a herding of the civilian population into a gated concentration camp facility that was being constructed in Rafah, over which the ISIS-linked gangs would be its de facto rulers.
There was also the infamous “General’s Plan”, drafted by former Israeli General Giora Eiland. This scheme was the goal that the Israeli military set out to complete in late 2024 and up until the January 2025 ceasefire agreement, which they later broke. To summarise it, they sought to ethnically cleanse the entire civilian population from the north of Gaza, in an attempt to isolate Hamas inside the area and surround it.
Threats were made in late 2024 to some 400,000 civilians that if they did not flee, they would all be considered combatants and were going to be targeted as such. It failed and militarily made no sense either, yet this was openly the plan at the time.
If we look at the evidence, the Israelis are now using this period of time in order to regroup, perhaps also to re-direct military attention to Lebanon also, while also seeking to find solutions to eliminate the civilian population. As they understand that ethnic cleansing will not be allowed in the form of a stampede into Egypt, the strategy is to ultimately create a situation under which the population will languish and slowly be forced to flee.
The Implications
What has happened is that the Israelis are being granted international supervision under the guise of a ceasefire. They are retrieving all their captives, dead and alive, which will take political pressure off of them, while they receive a break and praise from leaderships around the world for “ending the war”.
However, the war isn’t over, and this is something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly stated in a public address, in Hebrew, at the start of the ceasefire agreement. The difference now is that the governments of dozens of Arab, Muslim Majority, and Western nations are directly implicated in the ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza.
As I wrote for the Palestine Chronicle, at the beginning of the ceasefire, Phase two of the agreement will not fully go into effect, as there are fundamental disagreements between the Israelis and Palestinian resistance on the question of disarmament and Palestinian self-determination. Instead, it is more likely that we will remain in limbo at a prolonged Phase Once pause, the length of which is impossible to accurately determine.
Israel is not actually implementing the ceasefire; instead, it is taking a break from some of the more taxing combat missions in Gaza and toning down its bombing, something that it has done at different periods during the genocide when there was no ceasefire in place. Its demolition operations were always the bulk of the Israeli military operations during the war, because their goal has never been to destroy Hamas; it has been about destroying Gaza and its people, hence it is called a genocide.
The genocide really has little to do with Hamas as a group. Because even if Hamas were to be defeated, another resistance force would pop up to replace it, and the cycle would start once again. The Israelis are genocidal lunatics, but they aren’t stupid; they know full well that their national project’s success necessitates the total elimination of not only the Palestinian people, but also their mere national identity.
A multi-national coalition is now directly aiding in that project to eradicate the Palestinian identity and its cause for national liberation. This was also what the Saudi-French “New York Declaration” that was voted upon at the United Nations was all about, which I have written about here too, as is the Trump-Netanyahu so-called “peace plan”.
If these nations that are endorsing and are directly involved in the implementation of the Trump plan were truly genuine about seeking a “Two-State solution”, as their votes cast at the United Nations General Assembly this September suggested, then why go along with this project that has stated its opposition to “Two-States” from the outset?
It’s very simple, it is because they want the Palestinian cause gone. This is what the New York Declaration was. This is what the Saudi-French initiative outlined. It wasn’t a proposal for a State of Palestine. Why? Because they explicitly asserted that the “State” they seek must be the only completely disarmed nation on earth, it should also not have control over its own textbooks and is not allowed to have its own independent political parties; all of them must be banned, and only the Western-approved and funded corrupt politicians they choose are allowed into office.
This was the “State” they proposed. It provided no solid answers or conclusions on the “final status issues”, certainly nothing to offer to the Palestinian diaspora, no reparations paid by Israel, and no consequences for Israel, other than it would have to give up its pledge to parts of Gaza and the West Bank. Now look at what these nations have signed up for: Trump’s plan that doesn’t even offer this, that seeks to offer less than his 2020 “Deal of the Century” that is pretty close in its details to this Saudi-French proposal.
So what now, you may ask? Well, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has set forth Israeli stooge Hussein al-Sheikh to be its next unelected quasi-dictator and is attempting to leech whatever it can off of the Trump plan, sucking up to Saudi Arabia and every Arab regime it can for more scraps so that it can run its corrupt administration whose only function is to serve Israeli security coordination.
Unfortunately, this PA has swallowed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), hollowing out what was once an influential organization that now occupies the role of the State of Palestine at the UN. The PA represents nobody but its employees, and despite the best attempts of all the Palestinian political parties, including factions within the ruling Fatah Party itself, they continue to insist upon division. So, on the political front, until this US-EU-funded entity dies, there is little chance of unity, meaning a comprehensive political solution is, for now, off the cards.
On the Israeli side, they are scheming to try and ethnically cleanse Gaza, and as has been mentioned are not implementing the ceasefire; they even gave Hamas an impossible-to-fulfill ultimatum regarding withdrawing fighters hiding in tunnels from behind the Yellow Line. It was proven that Hamas cannot communicate with most of them, many of whom don’t even know there is a ceasefire. So this is just one of many excuses for Israel to ramp up its death and destruction.
When the Israeli-US scheme for Gaza eventually fails, after inflicting all the suffering that it will on the civilian population, they will then have to go to Plan B, restarting the full-scale genocide once again.
The picture now really depends upon what happens on the other fronts of this ongoing regional war and whether the likes of Hezbollah and Iran can dramatically change the picture. As for the Arab masses, there is always some possibility they could rise, but after two years of genocide and them living their lives as if nothing is happening, not a whole lot should be expected from them.
As I have written to conclude most of my analysis pieces over the past two years, this war is regional and will be fought until one side is decisively defeated. Therefore, either the Israelis succeed at exterminating a segment of the Palestinian population, ethnically cleansing the others, and placing the rest in concentration camps, or Israel is crushed. There are no other options.
Unless the Israelis are strategically defeated, the US, European, Arab and Muslim Majority nations collaborating with it, will back it in its Greater Israel Project until the end. These governments are now more involved than they were before and play their role with the taxes paid to them by their own people, selling their populations the lie that they are working towards peace.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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