Peace in Gaza? Despite Ceasefire and Hostage Releases, Palestinians Are Shamefully Sidelined As the World Plans a Colonial Takeover

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UPDATE October 23: For anyone interested in hearing me talk about Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan” for Gaza, what it means and what the future may hold, please check out my latest podcast with Andy Bungay, recorded on Sunday October 19, in which, over 50 minutes, we discussed this and other topical issues; in particular, the rise of the far-right, and the lamentable role played in its promotion by social media.

What kind of peace deal is this, when those it affects — the Palestinians subjected to illegal occupation by Israel for the last 58 years — are not supposed to have any say in their future?

Although those of us who don’t subscribe to the all-consuming genocidal death cult that Israel has become over the last two years are overwhelmingly relieved that the non-stop bombing and destruction of the Gaza Strip has stopped as a result of the recently-agreed ceasefire, we refuse to endorse the back-slapping celebrations of those who undertook and facilitated the genocide, their ongoing efforts to sideline the Palestinians themselves in negotiations about Gaza’s future, and the failure of the international community to recognize that, right now, what is most important is the urgent delivery not only of humanitarian aid on an unprecedented scale, but also of significant amounts of ground-clearing and reconstruction equipment, to avert what, otherwise, will be a cataclysmic humanitarian catastrophe already set in place by Israel.

For all but seven weeks of the last two years, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip have been subjected to a policy of genocidal extermination by the State of Israel that has been so sickening in its depravity that decent people around the world — in their billions — have become so thoroughly disgusted by its actions that they will never again sleep easily or know anything resembling joy until the Palestinians secure their own independent state, and until Israel’s leaders — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, past and present defense ministers Yoav Gallant and Israel Katz, president Isaac Herzog and far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — are held accountable for their monstrous genocidal crimes.

For these billions of people worldwide, including the entire Muslim world and roughly two-thirds of the populations of the countries of the west, there can also be no peace until the leaders of those western countries who have supported and enabled the genocide — the same people hypocritically celebrating yesterday at Donald Trump’s “peace summit” in Egypt, and hoping to whitewash both Israel’s monstrous crimes and their own complicity in those crimes — are also held accountable.

These are leaders who, fundamentally, conspired with Israel to conclude that nothing short of extermination could solve the long-standing “Palestinian problem”: the refusal of the historic population of Palestine to accept their complete subjugation by a messianic Jewish colonial terrorist movement, led by European settlers, which established the State of Israel 77 years ago in an orgy of violence in which 15,000 Palestinians were killed, and 700,000 exiled permanently from their homes.

Over the weekend, as the ceasefire took effect, for just the third time in these two years of unprecedented Israeli violence against a civilian population, preparations also began for the release, yesterday, of the last 20 surviving Israeli hostages and prisoners of war seized during Palestinian resistance fighters’ deadly incursion into southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian hostages and prisoners held in Israel’s brutal prisons for Palestinians.

Resurgent media bias over the release of hostages

As the hostages emerged, a familiar bias was re-established in western media reporting, which, over most of this year, had been steadily absorbing the revulsion of decent people worldwide, and had started to be critical of Israel and cognizant of the fact that the Palestinians were also human beings of worth.

As soon as the Israeli hostages were released, however, the western media were relentless in their fawning coverage of them, lavishly humanizing them and telling their stories, and overtly empathizing with their suffering, while the released Palestinians were, if they were mentioned at all, anonymous and sweepingly dehumanized.

The contrast in reporting was particularly stark and unjustifiable given that the majority of the 1,968 Palestinians released — 1,718 in total — were hostages as much as the Israelis were, having been seized in Gaza after October 7, largely on an entirely arbitrary basis, and held without charge or trial ever since.

Just as noticeable, even though the western media strove for the most part to avoid mentioning it, was the fact that the hostages released by Hamas looked mostly in good health and were not evidently starved, while the Palestinians were, as a BBC reporter let slip in an unsupervised live broadcast, “gaunt and emaciated”, and “pale”, with many bearing the signs of having been beaten immediately before release. To their credit, the Guardian managed to sympathetically report on their plight, noting of those released in the West Bank that “Their faces were gaunt, the sharp angles decorated by freshly scabbed-over wounds”, and also noting:

When asked about their treatment in the prisons, a prisoner apologized and said he could not answer, for fear that he would face repercussions from Israeli authorities, only saying that it was “horrible.”

Another said that the conditions were “very, very, very difficult”, and that the last two years in prison were the “worst two years of his life”, asking that he not be named.

However, it was largely only on social media that the Palestinians’ often horrifically heartbreaking stories emerged — to mention just two examples, the autistic teenager seized and held after being shot while waiting for humanitarian aid earlier this year, and the photo-journalist Shadi Abu Sido, who worked for Palestine Today, and who was abducted from Al-Shifa Hospital in March 2024. Abu Sido understandably raged at the violence and torture to which those seized had been subjected, and the personal abuse he had suffered, and could not believe the devastation in Gaza, and the failure of the world to stop it during the 19 months he was held. He also spoke of guards bragging about how they had killed all the journalists (which was almost true, and a war crime of horrific proportions), and how he had been told that his entire family had been murdered — although that, at least, was not true.

The largely ignored plight of Gaza’s doctors

Also largely unremarked on in the west was the inclusion, amongst those released, of 55 healthcare workers, as reported by Healthcare Workers Watch – Palestine — part of another horror story we’re presumably no longer meant to notice, even though Israel’s sweeping and persistent war on Gaza’s hospitals and its entire healthcare sector throughout its genocide has been a startlingly grotesque and sustained manifestation of war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination, as a UN Commission of Inquiry confirmed a year ago.

HWW noted that most of those released “were abducted by the Israeli Occupation Forces from the hospitals where they were working”, and ”have spent between nine and 22 months illegally imprisoned in Israeli detention facilities”, adding that, over the last two years, 409 healthcare workers have been unlawfully detained in both Gaza and the West Bank, and that at least 115 are still being held, including “at least 20 doctors, of whom 15 are irreplaceable senior consultants.” In addition, as Medical Aid for Palestinians noted in May, over 1,400 healthcare workers have been “killed in Israel’s systematic attacks on Gaza’s health system”, and at least five healthcare workers, including senior doctors, have been murdered in Israeli prisons.

One of those still held is Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, who finally handed himself in to Israeli forces last December, after holding out against a vicious military siege for many months. Dr. Abu Safiya has been subjected to brutal treatment in Israeli custody, presumably as Israel has tried to get him to confess — as with so any other medical personnel seized and held — to non-existent ties to Hamas, and his continued imprisonment, along with that of over a hundred of his colleagues, is a major scandal that Israel shouldn’t be allowed to get away with hiding through the indifference of western politicians and the media.

The pantomime of Trump’s “triumph”

While some mainstream media commentators also couldn’t help but notice that, as with previous hostage prisoners and releases, the families of those freed in the West Bank were prevented from celebrating their relatives’ release, through explicit threats of violence and re-arrest by the Israelis, and while others also couldn’t help but notice that those freed in Gaza were, as Shadi Abu Sido so memorably explained, deposited in an apocalyptic wasteland of horrific destruction, most of the day’s coverage focused on the Israeli hostages and on the pantomime of Trump’s “triumph”, and of Israel’s alleged “victory”, as though Trump’s “Peace Plan” had swept away the genocide.

The media subsequently lapped up, largely unquestioningly, the empty sloganeering of the “peace summit” hastily convened in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, at which the leaders of Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey were persuaded to sign the preposterously pompous Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity, “cheered on”, as Drop Site News noted, “by delegates from more than 34 other states, all applauding at the end of a two-year, live-streamed genocide that his administration enabled for the last 9 months.”

Absurdly, the two parties supposedly bound by Trump’s blandly generic Declaration weren’t even present — Israel and the people of Gaza.

Netanyahu — reeling from his ongoing unpopularity in Israel, where the hostages’ families have correctly and persistently blamed him for sacrificing their relatives to pursue an unwinnable genocidal war, and who is now facing a mutiny from the far-right ministers keeping his coalition government in power for having capitulated to Trump’s demand to end the war — was also prevailed on by Trump to attend the summit, but cried off at the last minute, while the Palestinians were only represented by Mahmoud Abbas, the decrepit and hugely unpopular president of the Palestinian Authority.

This, sadly, was a sure sign that, while the short-term aims of Trump’s “Peace Plan” were more or less achievable — securing the return of the last hostages, and prevailing upon Israel to stop its bombing — the longer-term solutions to the questions of Gaza’s post-genocide governance, and the Palestinians’ unquestionable right to independence, implacably opposed by Netanyahu, have still not really been addressed at all.

Ignoring the realities of life (and death) on the ground in Gaza itself

What Trump’s pantomime also made abundantly clear to me, however, was quite how much the realities of life on the ground in Gaza itself, the devastation wrought by Israel, and the plight of the Palestinians themselves, was being ignored.

As soon as the bombs stopped falling at the weekend, a familiar post-ceasefire scene was replayed in Gaza, as though it had fallen into an eerie time-loop, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians, driven from their homes by Israel’s persistent and deeply illegal policy of forced internal displacement, made their way back, along the remains of Gaza’s coastal road, to their homes — or rather, in most cases, to where their homes had once stood, but which, in many cases now, could no longer even be identified.

Eight months before, during the previous ceasefire, almost identical scenes had played out, although this time around the numbers were slightly less, because Israel has spent the intervening time continuing to exterminate as many Palestinians as possible.

For those finally arriving at their destinations, the desolation this time around has been even more horrendous than before, because, for the last eight months, Israel has also been engaged in the blatant but also deeply illegal demolition of every building that remained standing in the north, even resorting to hiring foreign bulldozer drivers to completely erase all trace of the Palestinians’ existence, as part of its intended aim of making the whole of Gaza unliveable.

The first time that this process of forcibly displaced Palestinians returning to their homes took place was at the end of November 2023, just seven weeks into the genocide, when, for six days, Israel’s post-October 7 bombardment of Gaza — a campaign of unparalleled destructive intensity over those first two months — was briefly halted to facilitate the exchange of hostages: 108 of the 251 hostages seized in Israel (81 Israelis, all women and children, and 23 Thais and a Filipino) in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners, nearly half of whom (107) were children.

While the truce held, in a broken but not yet entirely destroyed urban landscape, numerous forcibly displaced Palestinians returned home to discover heartbreaking scenes of destruction, searching through mountains of rubble for lost family members, or for fragments of possessions from what was already becoming their former lives.

Through the indulgence of Israel’s genocide by the US government, under Joe Biden, and through Israel’s apparently insatiable and essentially vampiric thirst for the blood of Palestinian civilians, another 14 months of sickening carnage followed until a more significant ceasefire deal — on the table throughout this whole period but persistently and deliberately suppressed by Netanyahu — was agreed as the complicit Biden administration gave way to the return of Donald Trump.

This time around, as the first six-week phase of an intended three-phase ceasefire deal began, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who once more made their way back to their homes after repeated forced displacements found even greater destruction, particularly in the north, where, for the previous four months, Israel had been engaged in a barbaric intensification of its destruction under what was known as the “Generals’ Plan.”

This had involved a sustained effort to displace the whole of the remaining population of around 400,000 people through starvation and intensive killing and the profoundly illegal threat that anyone who remained behind would be regarded as terrorists — or “enemy combatants” — who could then be summarily executed. The intention was, explicitly, to create a sterile military zone in the whole of the north, in which every surviving standing structure could then be razed to the ground — again, a policy that was jaw-droppingly illegal under international humanitarian law.

For six weeks, the ceasefire held, as 33 hostages and prisoners of war in Gaza — 28 Israelis and five Thais — were freed in phases, in exchange for 1,777 Palestinian prisoners, including many who had never been charged or tried, including children, others held under “administrative detention”, a diabolical form of endlessly renewable imprisonment without charge or trial, and others convicted of crimes, many of whom were sent into exile. As with yesterday’s reporting, however, the western media slavishly and emotively covered every aspect of the release of the Israelis, while largely ignoring the Palestinians.

During the ceasefire, deliveries of humanitarian aid — food, water, medical supplies and fuel — resumed in quantities deemed to be the bare minimum required for survival by the UN and international aid agencies. This was enough to stabilize the horrendous humanitarian crisis, but not to do anything more.

The last seven months of unprecedented genocidal destruction

Throughout this entire period, Israel refused access to any agency or organization that could, in the first pressing instance, have addressed the urgent need for shelter for a population of two million people, living in inadequate makeshift tents after being forcibly displaced from their homes, most of which had subsequently been destroyed or damaged beyond repair, and, in the second instance, could have brought in the equipment necessary to begin clearing what, in July 2024, the UN estimated as 40 million tonnes of rubble that could take as long as 15 years to clear at a cost of between $500 and $600 million, caused by bombardments equivalent to six times the intensity of the atomic bomb dropped by the US on Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War.

All of the thorny issues regarding reconstruction — as well as the equally challenging questions regarding the governance of post-genocide Gaza — were meant to be negotiated in subsequent phases of the ceasefire deal, but as the first phase came to an end, with 48 October 7 hostages still held (and around half thought to be still alive), the Israeli government cynically sabotaged the deal, imposing the most savage and long-lasting siege to date on all supplies of food, water, medical supplies and fuel into Gaza on March 2, which was so severe that, for two and a half months, nothing at all was allowed in, and following up, on March 18, with the resumption of its military attacks, undertaken with a ferocity not seen since the early weeks of the genocide, and stepped up in May with the launch of “Operation Gideon’s Chariots”, a plan for the complete takeover of Gaza.

It must be noted that Hamas had done absolutely nothing to break the terms of the ceasefire deal, and that Israel’s actions were therefore unforgivable, and yet, to their shame, Israel’s supporters in the west largely did nothing at all to prevent what was a clear escalation of genocidal intent above and beyond the genocidal crimes of the previous 17 months.

These had been so clearly barbaric that the International Court of Justice had warned of an impending genocide in January 2024, numerous other experts had asserted that a genocide was indeed taking place, and the International Criminal Court had actually issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, last November.

Slowly, as the atrocities worsened — with particularly notable horrors including the imposition of a joint US-Israeli food distribution system, meant to erase the presence of the UN and other international aid agencies, but which was soon revealed to be a trap in which desperately starving Palestinians were deliberately shot and killed by Israeli forces and US mercenaries, and the revelation, over the summer, that the most severe form of famine, deliberately engineered by Israel, was stalking the whole of Gaza — some of Israel’s allies began, finally, to do something rather than just murmur whispers of discontent.

Most noticeably, the recent decisions by several high-profile western allies — the UK, Canada, Australia, Portugal and France — to officially recognize the existence of the State of Palestine confirmed that Israel’s behavior was now so grotesque that pledging undying support for its relentless genocide was becoming untenable.

The next steps: independence for Palestine, not a new colonial takeover

Now that the first phase of this new ceasefire has been achieved — the release of hostages and prisoners, and the agreement by Israel to, at least mostly, stop killing Palestinians directly — the international community needs to urgently turn its attention not to the future, but to the urgent needs of the Palestinian people right now.

As Israel is already undermining the ceasefire agreement, using the pretext of the difficulties Hamas faces — and has openly acknowledged — in securing the return of the dead hostages to keep the Rafah Crossing closed, and also promising to halve the amount of humanitarian aid entering Gaza, just when it is so desperately needed, western countries need to react appropriately, with the threat of punishment, just as they also need to call for an international presence to be allowed to enter Gaza to supervise the debris-clearing and urgent infrastructure reconstruction that was meant to be undertaken earlier this year until Israel torpedoed the January ceasefire deal.

In the longer term, everyone involved in Trump’s Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity needs to recognize that, realistically, despite Israel’s preoccupation with disarming Hamas, its leaders, and those of other armed Palestinian factions, cannot reasonably be expected to give up all their weapons and make themselves and their people defenceless when their genocidal oppressor remains fully-armed, unrepentant about its genocide, and unpunished for it.

The stench of this hypocrisy, at the heart of Trump’s “Peace Plan”, which rewards Israel for its genocide while punishing the Palestinians for having endured it, really ought to be blindingly obvious to anyone capable of anything resembling objective analysis.

Western leaders — already, sickeningly, salivating about what they see as the profit-making possibilities involved in the colonial takeover of Gaza proposed in the “Peace Plan” — with or without the Israelis — need to drop their unspeakably vile ambitions, and recognize that the Palestinians alone should determine their future, and that the best way to achieve that is to pour money into creating tolerable living conditions in Gaza, and to hold elections as soon as it is feasible.

Most importantly — and this is particularly relevant for those countries that have recognized the existence of the State of Palestine — they must follow up on that commitment not by reversing course and continuing to deny Palestine its existence, but by pushing for full Palestinian independence from Israel, not just in Gaza, but also in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, meaningfully fulfilling their recognition of the existence of the State of Palestine, and also fulfilling the requirement of the hugely significant advisory opinion issued in July 2024 by the International Court of Justice, which condemned as illegal Israel’s presence, and its behavior, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip) ever since they were first militarily occupied in 1967, and ordered them to withdraw.

Without independence for Palestine, and, at the very least, the necessary de-fanging of Israel, there will never be peace. The time to push for it is now, and, if our leaders won’t listen, we pledge to continue to protest and dissent, as the largest transnational protest movement in western history, until they get the message.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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