‘Ceasefire’ is a hollow word for Palestinians – the killings, displacements and denial of aid continue | Nesrine Malik

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It has been just over six weeks since a ceasefire came into effect in Gaza, and it’s clear that it would more accurately be called a “reduce” fire, rather than a cessation. Scores of people are still being killed; enough, in any other scenario, to be deemed both alarming and newsworthy. More than 100 people have died since 19 January, Gaza’s civil defence service spokesperson says. Those killings constitute, alongside other breaches, a grim record of hundreds of reported ceasefire violations by the Israeli government.

The latest among them is Israeli authorities’ decision to halt humanitarian aid into Gaza, in order to put pressure on Hamas to accept new ceasefire terms: mere hours after the first phase of the ceasefire expired, Israel cut off all supplies. In doing so, Israel is using food and civilian relief as a political tool to achieve its objectives, a move that the Qatari foreign ministry, the midwife of hostage releases and ceasefire agreements over the past few months, called “a clear violation” of the terms of the truce and of international humanitarian law.

This is a blockade that won’t affect just a few Palestinians: it encompasses every single person living in Gaza. The entire population is held hostage. According to Amjad al-Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGO Network in Gaza, “the whole of Gaza’s population relies fully on aid, of all kinds, as a result of the demolition of the economic and social infrastructure”. The ceasefire as it stands now is no impediment to the death, starvation and besiegement of an entire population whose homes have been destroyed, and whose babies are still freezing to death in the chill of torn tents.

In the West Bank, the pattern of slow but grinding assault has been unfolding for months, and escalating for weeks. The overall death toll in the West Bank since 7 October due to intensifying settler violence and Israel Defense Forces attacks stands at almost 1,000, according to the Palestinian health ministry. The ceasefire has only exacerbated the situation. As Gaza draws less of its resources and active military engagement, Israel has shifted its attention to the occupied territories in the West Bank in a process that has been described as “Gaza-ification”. The war in Gaza, and what was allowed to pass there in terms of civilian killings, mass displacement and targeting of medical facilities, has become a stress-tested model that is now being applied in the West Bank. Safe in the knowledge that western allies will continue to support it and provide weapons and political cover, the Israeli government is repeating its tactics elsewhere.

The moment a ceasefire was agreed, Israel launched Operation Iron Wall, a military campaign in the West Bank, as if signalling with its timing that this is now a forever war of permanent vengeance. In the past year alone, more than 224 children have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces and settlers, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. To give an idea of how sharp the inflection point is, this number constitutes nearly half the total number of children killed in the West Bank since records began 20 years ago. Among them are Ayman al-Hammouni, his shooting caught on camera, adding to the archives of video and audio records of the chilling, panicked last moments and deaths of children across Palestinian territories. Among them also is two-year-old Layla al-Khatib, shot in her own home. And the unborn child of Sundos Jamal Mohammed Shalabi, eight months pregnant, who died along with the child when she was shot. And on it goes: relentless, unthinkable, unstoppable.

How a 12-year-old boy was killed in the West Bank – video analysis

The playbook and justifications are eerily similar to those used in Gaza. Targeting militants becomes the explanation for a whole range of ruinous activities, including but not limited to: destroying infrastructure, driving people out of their homes with no right of return (40,000 so far, in less than two months, according to Unrwa, the UN aid agency), targeting medical facilities and personnel, flattening entire neighbourhoods and that most lethal policy, loosening military rules of engagement to allow soldiers more leeway and mandate to open fire. According to Unrwa, “the use of airstrikes, armoured bulldozers, controlled detonations, and advanced weaponry by the Israeli forces has become commonplace” in the West Bank, and is “a spillover of the war in Gaza”. The result is an assault in the West Bank that is as historic as it was and is in Gaza.

Already, Operation Iron Wall is the longest in the West Bank since the second intifada. Tanks have rolled in and IDF soldiers are settling in for the long haul in refugee camps in areas such as Jenin and Tulkarm, for the first time in 20 years. These actions mark a material change in how Israel is choosing to engage with Palestinian populations in Gaza and the West Bank. A transition has been made from brutal attrition through settler violence, siege, legal overreach and detention without trial to a more lethal and oppressive mode of authority that seems to have no strategic purpose or long-term plan for stability. The aim seems to be the expansion of settlements, military presence and the kettling in and control of millions of Palestinian people’s lives, dictating everything from whether it is time for them to eat, to whether they have a right to live. The result is a diminishment of what little the Palestinians already have – even less land, even less autonomy and even fewer human rights.

In such an asymmetrical power balance, and with such impunity, Israel is not incentivised to act in a way that winds things down. Israel’s blockade of Gaza reveals a cavalier attitude to the importance of maintaining the negotiations. If the ceasefire collapses in Gaza, the conflict will return to resulting in disproportionately high casualties on the Palestinian side. If more people die in the West Bank, that only nourishes the settlements that expand into the territories of those driven away.

Such a bloody and suffocating state of ceasefire should not mislead anyone that Israel-Palestine is on a path of return to the status quo before the war, or that there is any promise of a stable future after it. Donald Trump, Arab leaders and the Israeli government can go back and forth as much as they like on what is the best “Gaza plan”. The reality is that the war in Gaza may be over for now; but something else, across all Palestinian territories, has begun.