In case you missed it: read our new interview with journalist Paul Holden on the collapse of Labour Together.

Last week, the Board of Peace held its inaugural meeting in Washington DC, with US president Donald Trump boasting that nine member states had pledged $7 billion to a Gaza reconstruction fund managed by the World Bank. Trump himself promised an additional $10 billion from the US. 

“Every dollar spent is an investment in stability and the hope of a new and harmonious [region],” Trump said. “The Board of Peace is showing how a better future can be built right here in this room.”

Anybody listening might assume a new page is turning in Gaza. A process is underway that promises to end more than two years of suffering; now it is a matter of ensuring it proceeds efficiently.

“The war in Gaza is over,” he declared. “The ceasefire was held, and every last remaining hostage, both living and dead, has been returned home.” 

Except it isn’t a war, and it isn’t over. 

In Palestine, the terms of colonisation are perpetually reframed and sanitised:  land dispute becomes the language for outright land theft, while ethnic cleansing and occupation are referred to as self-defence and security, apartheid as democracy, war as genocide. Now, ceasefire itself provides linguistic cover for genocide. 

With over 600 Palestinians killed by Israel since the so-called ceasefire, Israel continues to demonstrate its deliberate, systematic policy of dismantling conditions for Palestinian survival – through ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate slaughter, and engineered famine.

All this has been made possible by a compliant global environment that treats the Israeli annihilation of Palestinians as retaliatory, controlled, and temporary, rather than the ultimate strategic objective.

In reality, the only ceasing to which Israel subscribes is the cessation of Palestinian existence. 

Left to die a slow death 

February’s Board of Peace meeting came one month after Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff announced the beginning of the second phase of the ceasefire. This stage was meant to see a temporary committee of Palestinian technocrats instated for the day-to-day running of the territory. 

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, has prevented this committee from entering or operating in Gaza – while the Israeli army’s chief of staff has reportedly approved new plans for a large-scale incursion. 

This is the inevitable development of the “peace deal” announced last October, which political leaders and pundits around the world welcomed with widespread relief. 

As these same leaders gathered in Washington to repeat the fiction of movement from one stage of ceasefire to the next, they reasserted the big lie at the core of this project: that there is any peace at all. 

“When what was called a ‘ceasefire’ was announced, we thought the war had ended, but the reality was the opposite. Israeli targeting did not stop, humanitarian aid and medical supplies are still barred from entering, and hospitals are left to face their fate,” Haitham, a 26-year-old entrepreneur,  messaged me from Gaza.“The wounded and the sick are left to die a slow death, despite their desperate need for treatment outside this hell.

What is referred to as peace is not real peace. Even at this moment, as I write to you, military aircraft are flying above my head. I do not know whether I will be targeted or not. I live every minute as if it were the last.”

Haitham was born and raised in northern Gaza. His father was killed by Israeli forces in 2001 when he was only 4 months old. Like everyone else in the territory, he’d only ever known life under suffocating Israeli control. But just before October 2023, he’d set up his own office and took the first concrete steps towards applying his degree and building a future.

Today, his dreams, his project, and everything he envisioned for his future has been crushed. 

“There is no ceasefire here. There is no peace. There is no life.” 

A child a day

For much of the past two years, so the argument went, Israel’s pummelling of Gaza was part of a complex hostage retrieval operation that sat within the parameters of Israel’s ironclad right to defend itself. 

This linguistic reframing gave Israel permission to commit crimes of epic proportions: approximately one child every 20 minutes was being killed in Gaza. The enclave now has the world’s highest child amputation rate.  Over 75,000 tonnes of explosives were dropped on Gaza and more than 2,700 families in Gaza have been completely wiped out. Israel used weapons on Palestinians that made thousands literally evaporate. 

Now, continued Israeli bombardment has been presented merely as a “test of the ceasefire”. Endless killings could not bring the Guardian to state clearly that Israel was, once again, comprehensively violating ceasefires. Double digit casualties on a regular basis were only a test for the “fragile” ceasefire, as Sky News explained – rather than concrete proof of a genocide continuing apace. . 

For context, by day 104 of the supposed truce, Israel had attacked Gaza on 89 of those supposedly peaceful days – amounting to over 1,000 violations of the ceasefire and the death of a child a day. A ceasefire that still kills children is not a ceasefire, UNICEF says. For a ceasefire to exist, the fire must cease – but it never did. 

This stage of the violence goes far beyond aerial strikes. Research shows Israel recently razed the remains of at least 300 homes and agricultural sites in Gaza. The areas of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia  have specifically been identified by settlers as yet more Palestinian land they can steal. 

Likewise, the New York Times reports that in the last few months alone, Israel has demolished at least 2,500 structures. Israel isn’t just occupying half the Gaza Strip, it is ensuring it remains perpetually uninhabitable for Palestinians. That “Gaza will become a place where no human can exist”, along with the whole avalanche of genocidal statements made by Israeli officials, was not reactionary hyperbole; it was the strategic objective starkly expressed. 

Settling back into the status-quo

Under the so-called truce, Israel was meant to allow aid to enter Gaza in quantities sufficient to meet the needs of its over 2 million inhabitants. Yet Ibrahim, a dentist originally from Gaza City, tells me that while non-essential items are appearing in droves, “urgent medical supplies, medical equipment, and basic necessities for our survival are not being allowed in. The items we need to sustain life, that is what Israel is ensuring isn’t accessible in Gaza.”

Around 3,500 people in Gaza hold medical referrals for treatment outside the territory, but Israeli authorities have not allowed them to travel. Likewise, medication is not available: reports indicate a 70 percent shortage of cancer treatments and painkillers, as well as a 56 percent shortage of essential drugs. 

It’s a shift from an intense genocide to a slow-paced one – or “a new form of genocide”, as other residents in Gaza describe it.  For instance, at least five children have frozen to death in Gaza since October 2025, while many more have also been killed by collapsing buildings and the wider effects of cold temperatures. 

Amnesty International has recently noted that Israel’s deliberate blocking of shelter and repair materials for the overwhelmingly displaced population in Gaza amounts to a continuation of genocide. Yet Israel continues to benefit from what has long enabled its decades-long oppression of Palestinians: global detachment, reduced and inconsistent coverage, and a fog of euphemistic language to describe clear-cut war crimes. Indeed, new analysis shows that mainstream media coverage since the ceasefire was announced has lessened considerably. 

Two plus years of live-streamed, industrial-scale atrocities were supposed to reignite focus and urgency. We were, I thought, supposed to never look away again, as we dismantled the status-quo that led to years of genocide. 

This is at risk of crumbling away. It’s clear that the pre-7 October doctrine again reigns supreme among the world’s elite: mealy-mouthed statements about the complex conflict of two supposedly irreconcilable warring sides (otherwise known as unconditional support for Israel). 

Britain’s approach embodied this for years. Endless atrocities in Gaza would be met with half-hearted calls for inquiries to establish the facts even as they stare ministers in the face. Calls would be made for international law to be upheld – even as bombardment, home demolitions, forcible displacement proceed uninhibited. All followed by the usual robotic renditions about a two-state solution that can end the conflict and achieve sustainable peace –  as Israel actively neutralises the very possibility on the ground. 

Like clockwork, when Israel recently announced plans to entrench a one apartheid state reality in the West Bank, the UK government “strongly condemned” it. 

But the very governments that armed Israel’s genocide, that provided the surveillance and ensured diplomatic cover was unconditional, don’t really have any issue with looking away from more Palestinian suffering – just as the media ecosystem which dehumanised Palestinians, distorting and diluting the horrors they endured, needs no second invitation to continue shielding the public from facts on the ground. The idea of a “process” being set in motion or “progress” being made is completely absurd. The Board of Peace is simply today’s Oslo: a series of pointless platitudes designed to distract from reality with a veneer of naive optimism, false hope, and compromised technocratic solutions. All while the same, unwavering settler colonial objectives are carried out, 79 years and counting. 

But Palestinian limbs weren’t savagely shredded and burnt alive by Israeli bombs for more than 24 months so that the world can settle back into a passive acceptance of Israeli colonisation. 

We must not look away.▼