Ceasefire

Before October 2023, calling for a ceasefire was a standard response from diplomats and politicians when massive military violence was unleashed by a state against a largely unarmed population (especially if the population was under military occupation by the state, which should entitle them to extra protections under the Geneva Conventions). Since October 2023, ‘ceasefire’ became construed as a radical cry by demonstrators and campus activists to be policed and curtailed. Those who called for it were at risk: from Whitehall and the City to universities and the street.

One can only hope that in the future the failure to call for a ceasefire during Israel’s genocide in Gaza will not only be a source of great shame, but, more concretely, that there will be criminal investigations into the silence from and silencing by those in power.

The terms of the ceasefire eventually agreed for 19 January 2025 are, as Mouin Rabbani and others have pointed out, pretty much identical to those that were close to being agreed on 27 May 2024. Failure to reach a deal then prolonged the agony for the Israeli hostages and their families. For the Palestinians in Gaza it meant at least another ten thousand deaths. Itamir Ben Gvir, Israel’s former national security minister who responded to the ceasefire by resigning from the cabinet, took the credit for preventing an earlier deal, demonstrating the perfidy of the US administration in blaming Hamas.

‘Why aren’t you in The Hague?’ called out Sam Husseini, the communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, as he was removed from Anthony Blinken’s last press conference as US secretary of state. ‘You’re manhandling me,’ he told the security staff, as they lifted him up by his arms and feet. Some of the other journalists filmed it on their phones. ‘I’m a journalist, not a potted plant,’ Husseini protested.

When Major-General Oded Basyuk visited London this week, a journalist from Declassified UK asked him on his way into the Royal United Services Institute if he was ‘worried about being investigated by the ICC for war crimes’. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ the RUSI security guard told the journalist, closing the door in his face. ‘Get back on the street.’

Out on the streets, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign announced on 8 January that the Metropolitan Police ‘intend to go back on a previous agreement and impose conditions to prevent us marching from BBC HQ at Portland Place on Saturday 18 January’. The original plan had been to protest against the pro-Israel bias of the BBC’s coverage of the war in Gaza. The protest went ahead on Whitehall, with more than a thousand police officers in attendance. According to Ismail Patel, writing for Middle East Eye:

as video evidence shows, police voluntarily allowed us to go through, telling us: ‘Make your way through please.’ Despite this, police then turned on protesters, escalating the situation and arresting more than seventy people. Ten people, including several over the age of sixty, were charged with public order offences.

A friend at the demonstration said the policing felt ‘like a trap’. Dozens of legal scholars signed a letter to the home secretary asking for an inquiry into the policing of the demonstration. The British Palestinian Committee also wrote to the UK government of its serious concerns:

This escalation highlights a broader pattern of targeting anti-war and pro-Palestinian demonstrations, creating a chilling effect on the right to protest for those advocating justice for Palestinians.

In the four days between the official announcement of the ceasefire by Qatar and its coming into effect, Israel intensified its bombardment of Gaza, killing 247 Palestinians. Since the ceasefire began at least two Palestinians have been killed in Southern Gaza.

Doctor Ghassan Abu Sitta, waiting to re-enter Gaza, spoke of the people there trying to unearth the bodies of their friends and relatives from the rubble. Hundreds of health workers have been killed. ‘They killed all the nephrologists,’ Ghassan said, ‘and destroyed all of the kidney dialysis units.’

For each individual connected to Gaza, the losses are specific, personal and multifold. Mosab Abu Toha, a poet from northern Gaza, wrote of his despair at seeing images of the destroyed Edward Said Library:

Today morning with a heavy heart I received the news of the destruction of the Edward Said Public Library in Beit Lahia, north Gaza. The news and pictures came through just three days after Gazans were allowed to return to north Gaza. Starting 2016, I started collecting books from around the world to build Gaza’s first English language library. With the endorsement and support of authors and intellectuals around the world, I raised the needed funds to open the library in the summer of 2017.

On the first day of his second term as US president, Donald Trump described Gaza as a ‘phenomenal location on the sea’. Living in a tent close to the beach in southern Gaza, my friend Marwa has had her request for permission to travel to the north, to visit her elderly mother, denied three times for ‘security’ reasons. There has been no news of her cousin, who used to look after her mother, since he was taken by the Israeli army over a month ago. He is in his seventies. In the north, Marwa’s colleague K wrote this week: ‘Everyone is fine, thank God, as for the children. Now the biggest problem is that there is no home, everything was destroyed.’ Sending money to K is difficult: Jordanian banks have held larger sums for several months for ‘security reasons’. Only small transfers get through, and none to Palestinian banks that I have tried.

For Israel, the ceasefire is not only patchy, it is on one front only. Since Sunday it has turned its sights on the occupied West Bank, where attacks by settlers and the army have intensified. At least ten people have been killed in Jenin and thousands displaced. The Israeli government is threatening to ban UNRWA, which provides vital support to millions of Palestinians, from operating in the West Bank next week. As Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Territories, observed, ‘if Israel can ban a UNGA subsidiary body from the territory it unlawfully occupies, without facing consequences, it means nothing coming from the UN will ever hold it back.’ She called on the UN to ‘UNseat Israel.’ The Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, has spoken of the intention to deploy methods used in Gaza against the West Bank population.