In Palestinian Dialect, "Ceasefire" Means Death

On fake ceasefires, frozen babies, diplomatic traps, and how genocide gets rebranded as self-defense

There’s a word that keeps appearing in international statements about Gaza, a word that diplomats and journalists keep using as if saying it enough times will make it real: ceasefire. The United States brokered a “ceasefire” in October, 2025. The “ceasefire” is holding, officials insist. Israel is committed to the “ceasefire.” We need to move to phase two of the “ceasefire.”

Meanwhile in actual Gaza, the place where this “ceasefire” is allegedly happening, Israel has committed 969 documented violations of the agreement, killed at least 418 Palestinians, injured over 1,100 more, bombed residential neighborhoods, expanded its military control deeper into the territory, announced plans to build settlements in northern Gaza, and banned 37 humanitarian organizations, including Doctors without Borders (MSF), from operating in the strip. But sure, ceasefire, let’s keep calling it that.

The semantic absurdity would be funny if babies weren’t freezing to death in flooded tents while the international community congratulates itself on achieving peace. This isn’t a ceasefire with violations, this is a genocide with better branding. The word “ceasefire” is functioning as diplomatic cover, allowing Israel to continue destroying Gaza while the world treats the violence as aberrational rather than systemic, as violations of an agreement rather than the continuation of the exact same policy under a different label.

And it’s working beautifully. Every time Israel bombs a building or kills a family, the international response isn’t “Israel is still committing genocide” but rather “Israel violated the ceasefire to kill some unverified member of Hamas,” (because Hamas is the problem). The framing does enormous work here, transforming ongoing extermination into a technical breach of protocol, something that can be managed through diplomatic pressure rather than something that requires actually stopping Israel. BECAUSE ISRAEL NEEDS TO BE STOPPED BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

But here’s the really perverse part of how this ceasefire functions, Israel isn’t just violating it with impunity, Israel is actively trying to provoke Hamas into responding so they can claim Hamas broke the ceasefire and use that as justification to formally end it and resume open warfare. The entire apparatus is a trap. Israel keeps killing Palestinians, keeps expanding territorial control, keeps demolishing homes and blocking aid, keeps making life unlivable, and then waits for Hamas to exercise its legal right to resist occupation. The moment Hamas responds to any of these provocations, the ceasefire is “officially” broken and Israel gets to launch another massive assault with full international blessing because it was Hamas violated the agreement.

On October 29 of 2025, Israel killed 109 Palestinians that day, including 52 children, one of the deadliest days of the so-called ceasefire. The pretext was an exchange of gunfire in Rafah that killed one Israeli soldier. Because IOF soldiers are moral people who are not illegally occupying land and committing genocide. Hamas’s armed wing pointed out that Israel controls the Rafah area, that they had no contact with Palestinian fighters there, that the entire incident happened in Israeli-controlled territory. Didn’t matter. Trump called Israel’s response “retribution” and said “they should hit back.”

The logic is designed to be one-directional. When Israel kills hundreds of Palestinians during the ceasefire, when they bomb a school sheltering children, those are violations but the ceasefire continues. When one Israeli soldier dies in Israeli-controlled territory under circumstances nobody can verify, that becomes justification for massive retaliation. And if Hamas ever responds to Israel’s ongoing attacks with anything more than statements, if they fire back at the forces bombing their neighborhoods or demolishing their homes or blocking their aid, that will be treated as Hamas breaking the ceasefire and Israel will have the green light to end the charade entirely.

This is why Israel keeps pushing, keeps expanding the Yellow Line deeper into residential areas, keeps bombing civilian infrastructure, keeps creating conditions of such misery and desperation that some kind of armed response becomes inevitable.

The brilliance of the trap is that Hamas is damned either way. If they don’t respond to Israel’s ongoing attacks, Israel continues the slow genocide under ceasefire cover, continues starving the population and annexing territory while the international community celebrates the peace process. If they do respond, if they exercise the right to resist, they’ll be blamed for ending the ceasefire and Israel will use that as justification for devastation that makes the past year look restrained.

It’s the same dynamic that’s played out for decades.

The agreement itself was designed to produce this outcome. The terms required 600 aid trucks per day to enter Gaza. The actual average been 253 trucks per day, less than half what was promised. Israel is blocking meat, dairy, vegetables, medicine, tents, construction materials, anything that might allow Palestinians to survive with dignity or rebuild any semblance of normal life. But chocolate, crisps, and soft drinks are flowing in freely, because nothing says ceasefire like allowing a population to slowly starve while maintaining the aesthetic of humanitarian concern.

Dr. Thaer Ahmad, an emergency room physician who worked in Gaza, describes the reality: “The world must stop treating the word ‘ceasefire’ as a guarantee of safety when Gaza’s residents remain under fire, under siege, and under conditions that guarantee more suffering and heartbreak.”

We are watching babies die from hypothermia because Israel won’t allow warm clothes or proper tents into Gaza, we are watching families wake up in flooded shelters with nowhere to go, we are watching the deliberate creation of conditions where winter itself becomes a weapon. At least 16 people died during the December storms, including a two-week-old infant found “cold as ice” in a flooded tent, a 29-day-old premature baby who died from hypothermia despite his family’s desperate attempts to keep him warm. These aren’t natural deaths, these are murders by policy, the predictable result of blocking the materials that would allow people to survive a winter storm.

Israel is blocking timber, plywood, sandbags, water pumps, all the basic supplies needed to reinforce shelters or deal with flooding, claiming these are “dual-use” items that could somehow be weaponized. They did this after they bombed Gaza in 2014. A sandbag is apparently a security threat. A water pump could be used for terrorism. The absurdity is the point, the exercise of power so arbitrary and cruel that it doesn’t even need to make sense anymore, it just needs to be accepted. The international community is either too stupid to see this trap being set or complicit in it. Probably both.

And it is being accepted. The international community watches 27,000 tents get flooded or destroyed, watches 13,000 families end up on the streets again, watches 795,000 people in immediate danger from freezing temperatures and flooding, and the response is to urge Israel to allow more aid while continuing to describe the situation as a ceasefire. Ten countries including Britain, France, and Canada issued a joint statement expressing “serious concerns” about the “renewed deterioration of the humanitarian situation,” describing conditions as “catastrophic” and “appalling,” but they’re still calling it a ceasefire. Without sanctions, without military intervention, without isolating Israel and ending occupation, these statements are empty. Gazan’s can’t eat statements. Statements can’t free our people.

The International Court of Justice issued provisional measures in January 2024 finding that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza. Those measures required Israel to prevent genocidal acts, prevent and punish incitement to genocide, and allow humanitarian assistance into Gaza. Israel has ignored every single measure. The court reaffirmed those measures multiple times. Israel continues to ignore them. In October the court issued an advisory opinion rejecting Israel’s accusations against UNRWA and stating explicitly that Israel has a duty not to impede aid from UN agencies. Israel responded by maintaining its restrictions on UNRWA and now banning 37 additional humanitarian organizations from operating in Gaza. Doctors Without Borders, one of the largest medical organizations in Gaza supporting about 20 percent of hospital beds and one-third of births, is being banned. The Norwegian Refugee Council, CARE International, the International Rescue Committee, Oxfam, all being expelled. Israel claims these organizations failed to provide adequate information about their staff, alleging some cooperated with Hamas, which is the same accusation Israel makes about literally every organization that operates in Gaza and documents what’s happening there. The pattern is obvious, organizations that witness and report on Israeli crimes get accused of terrorism and expelled, making it harder to document the ongoing genocide, which makes it easier for the international community to maintain the ceasefire fiction.

The ceasefire is also providing cover for Israel to physically expand its control over Gaza, to advance the territorial annexation that’s been the goal all along. Since the ceasefire began, Israel has been systematically moving the “Yellow Line” deeper into Gaza, the boundary supposedly separating Israeli-controlled areas from civilian areas. Dalia Abu Ramadan, writing from Gaza City, describes watching this happen in real time as families in Al-Shujaiya fleeing as Israeli forces advanced and artillery intensified, returning to find concrete blocks placed 500 meters west of where the Yellow Line was originally drawn. The Israeli army shifted the yellow markers, extending the zone it controls in eastern Gaza City by an additional 300 meters into residential neighborhoods.

And then Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz just came out and said the quiet part loud, announcing plans to establish “new military-agricultural outposts” in northern Gaza, settlements to replace the ones evacuated in 2005. He specified that the Nahal infantry brigade would be deployed in these proposed outposts, that Israel has no intention of fully withdrawing from Gaza. This directly contradicts the ceasefire agreement’s terms requiring Israeli withdrawal, but Katz said it anyway because he understands the same thing everyone understands, that the ceasefire is theater, nobody’s actually going to enforce its terms, so why not just announce the settlement plans now? And if that announcement provokes Hamas into responding, even better, that’s the justification right there.

This is happening in the West Bank too. Israel’s security cabinet approved 19 new settlements across the occupied West Bank in December, including revival of two northern outposts dismantled in 2005. The Israeli press reported this was “coordinated with the US in advance,” which tells you everything about what the United States means when it talks about supporting the ceasefire. Settler violence in the West Bank hit record levels in 2025, over 260 attacks in a single month, an average of eight per day. During olive harvest season alone there were 150 settler attacks on Palestinians and their property, more than double the number from the previous year. Over 4,200 olive trees vandalized or destroyed. More than 75 towns and villages targeted.

The UN has recorded nearly 1,500 settler attacks against Palestinians since the beginning of 2025, 232 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank including 52 children, over 1,700 attacks causing casualties or property damage.

Israel has also published tenders for nearly 5,700 settlement housing units this year, an all-time record, approximately 50 percent higher than the previous peak in 2018. These plans could bring roughly 25,000 additional settlers to live in Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank. Peace Now describes this as systematic expansion of a colonial structure, and they’re being diplomatic about it because what’s actually happening is the completion of annexation that’s been ongoing for decades, just accelerated during a period when the world is supposedly focused on maintaining peace. And accelerated specifically to provoke the response that ends the peace.

The legal status of all this is unambiguous. All of Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are illegal under international law and constitute war crimes under the Rome Statute.

The ceasefire also allows third states to claim progress on conflict resolution, to point to the agreement as evidence they’re working toward peace, even as the genocide continues and intensifies and Israel actively works to engineer its official resumption. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 2803 in November endorsing Trump’s plan for Gaza, creating two new governing bodies that would operate in coordination with Israel, effectively installing another layer of foreign control over Palestinians. The resolution makes no mention of the genocide, proposes no accountability mechanism for war crimes, allows for bypassing existing aid structures, and gives the United States control over Gaza’s future.

But you can’t stabilize genocide and you can’t reconstruct while demolition is ongoing and you can’t expect a population to accept extermination without resistance. Israel demolished buildings in Zeitoun, Tuffah, Maghazi, and Nuseirat refugee camps during the ceasefire. Naval vessels fired on fishermen off the Gaza City coast. Artillery shelling continued across multiple regions. The Israeli air force fired missiles near the Al-Bureij refugee camp. All of this documented, all of it happening during the ceasefire.

The question isn’t whether Israel is violating the ceasefire. The question is whether there ever was a ceasefire or whether that word is just doing the work of allowing everyone to look away while the killing continues at a slightly lower intensity with better excuses. When you can kill 109 people in a day and have the US president call it justified retaliation, when you can starve over a million people and call it security screening of dual-use items, when you can ban every major humanitarian organization and call it counterterrorism, when you can announce settlement plans in territory you’re supposedly withdrawing from and walk it back with a wink, you’re not violating a ceasefire, you’re operating under a framework that was designed to permit exactly what you’re doing while setting the trap for what comes next.

So babies will continue to freeze to death in flooded tents and families will continue to get bombed in their shelters during the ceasefire while the Yellow Line takes more and more of their land.