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This Is Not a Ceasefire: The Israeli Genocide Continues

Vijay Prashad

On 19 January 2025, a ceasefire took effect to halt the Israeli bombing of Palestinians in Gaza. This ceasefire emerged from a mediation process by Egypt, Qatar, and the United States, which had been sealed in June 2024 with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2735. However, the Israelis rejected the agreement and waited until Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election to proceed so that Trump could take credit for the deal.

Yet, Israel neither fully withdrew from Gaza nor ceased its attacks, nor did it allow the necessary aid into Gaza. Despite the ‘ceasefire’, the genocide against the Palestinians continued. A month into the ceasefire period, it was clear that Israel had committed at least 265 violations of the agreement (including home demolitions, ground incursions, and shootings targeting civilians). During this time, the United Nationsfound that 81‘percent’ of Gaza was either controlled by the Israeli military or subject to arbitrary Israeli displacement orders.

That first ceasefire ended in March and was only revived in October 2025. During the intervening period, Israel took advantage of the situation to pummel Gaza once more without facing criticism from its major backers in Europe and the United States (who continued to arm Israel). The second ‘ceasefire’ has been as ineffective as the first, with Israel having violated its terms 875 times between 10 October and 22 December.

Thus, there is a ceasefire in Gaza, insofar as the intensity of the bombing has lessened; but there is no ceasefire in substance, as Israel’s genocidal pressure campaign against the Palestinians continues.

It is worth assessing the situation on the ground in Gaza. Facts are important, and it is key that the United Nations agencies have resumed their basic humanitarian aid work – which includes the collection of data on the problems faced by the Palestinians. I rely heavily on UN data here, especially from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, (UNRWA), which is itself under attack from Israel for being an impediment to its extermination campaign. For clarity, I have provided a brief sketch of four principal areas of bare life in Gaza (some of the data relies on the UN’s dashboard for monitoring UN Security Council Resolution 2720):

Displacement and Housing

In March 2025, UNRWA estimated that 92 ‘percent’ of all housing in Gaza had been either destroyed or severely damaged. Therefore, the 2.1 million surviving residents of Gaza have been living in UN-run displacement sites or in tents and temporary shelters perilously built into destroyed buildings. The UN Mine Action Service warns that unexploded Israeli bombs litter the rubble and that it would take experts 20 to 30 years to remove them. Heavy rain in Gaza this winter has flooded tents, creating a serious crisis of acute respiratory infections, diarrhea, and hepatitis.

Food and Water

The ceasefire deal stated that the Israelis, who control the frontier, would allow 600 trucks of aid into Gaza per day. However, between October and December, the Israelis only allowed an average of 216 trucks per day, according to the UN 2720 Monitoring and Tracking Dashboard. This shortfall is a primary reason why the food, water, and fuel situation in Gaza remains dire. Three sentences from a recent UNreport deserve wide coverage: first, ‘at least 1.6 million people – or 77 per cent of the population – are still facing high levels of acute food insecurity in the Gaza Strip, including over 100,000 children and 37,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women’, second, ‘Nutrition-rich foods, particularly proteins, remain scarce and prohibitively expensive, leaving 79 per cent of households unable to buy food or have access to clean water’, and third, ‘No children are reaching minimum dietary diversity and two-thirds experience severe food poverty, consuming one to two food groups’ (out of five food groups).

Health Care

By December 2025, Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure remained severely degraded. Many hospitals and clinics are damaged or only partially functional, with critical shortages of medicines and supplies, frequent interruptions of fuel and electricity, and service availability far below pre-conflict levels. UN agencies describe conditions as fragile, overstretched, and struggling.The Gaza Health Cluster Bulletin provides useful data, with the most recent bulletin noting that ‘the ongoing military operations continue to exacerbate several operational constraints that has been numerously elaborated including continued restrictions to access program sites and severely limited entry of essential medical supplies, continuous looming threats of deregistration of INGOs [international non-governmental organisations]’. Nonetheless, in the ruins of the al-Shifa hospital, 168 Palestinian doctors graduated on Christmas Day.

Education

The UN Education Cluster reports that more than 97 ‘percent’ of Gaza’s schools have been damaged, with only 38 ‘percent’ of school-aged children able to access any learning over the past two years. Over 700,000 Palestinian children have lost the right to education, including 658,000 who have already lost two academic years. Around 71,000 students in Gaza could not take their General Secondary Education Examinations (Tawjihi) and therefore cannot move to higher education.

Bare life is not yet restored, nor has the capacity for the Palestinians to revive their political institutions. No real progress can be made to end the genocide and occupation if Israel continues to prevent Palestinian leaders of different factions from rebuilding their political institutions. During this ‘ceasefire’, Israel has assassinated several important Palestinian political leaders, such as Issam al-Da’alis (Hamas’ Government Administrative Committee), Mahmoud Abu Watfa (Interior Ministry), and Huthayfa al-Kahlout (spokesperson for the al-Qassam Brigades), and Israel continues to hold leaders such as Marwan Barghouti (Fatah) and Ahmad Sa’adat (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) in prison. Israel’s insistence on the disarmament of Hamas demonstrates Tel Aviv’s lack of seriousness to negotiate in any direction.

This is both a ceasefire and not a ceasefire. It is a relief that the intensity of the bombing has decreased, but it is no relief for everyday life– especially with no end in sight beyond the anticipation of the next atrocity.

[Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, most recent being (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power (New Press, August 2022). Courtesy: Globetrotter, a project of Independent Media Institute, a nonprofit organization that educates the public through a diverse array of independent media projects and programs.]

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A Moment of Hope in Gaza

Kathy Kelly

On Thursday, December 25th, 2025, during Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians, 168 students graduated from medical school, in Gaza. Wearing their white coats, they stood in front of the ruined façade of what was formerly Gaza’s largest hospital, the Al-Shifa Medical Complex. As a backdrop, the destroyed building realistically conveys perils the graduates faced while earning their medical degrees. Throughout the last two years of their studies, they risked assassination, injury, arrest, imprisonment, and torture, as well as attacks on their own family members.

Israel has waged a systematic campaign to destroy Gaza’s health care delivery and to kill or imprison health care professionals. From October of 2023 to October of 2025, The World Health Organization documented687 Israeli attacks on Gazan health care facilities and 211 attacks on ambulances. These attacks killed 985 people. In the same time period, Israel detained over 306 health care workers.

Health Care Workers Watch – Palestine, a nongovernmental organization, reports that 95 Palestinian health care workers are still in prison, eighty of whom are from Gaza. Prisoners who have been released from detention report that doctors are singled out for particularly brutal treatment.

Among the 80 Gazan health care workers who are still detained is the former director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. On December 27, 2025, Dr. Abu Safiya began his second year of imprisonment.

For over a year, prior to his incarceration, the Israeli military had subjected the Kamal Adwan hospital to repeated sieges and attacks. Dr. Abu Safiya and his staff, refusing to desert their patients, managed to increase the number of available beds in the hospital as theirs became one of the few hospitals still operating in northern Gaza.

On October 25, 2024, Israel raided the hospital, bombing its buildings, detaining many patients, and arresting all hospital staff, including Dr. Abu Safiya who was interrogated and released. On that same day, an Israeli drone attacked one of the hospital buildings and killed Dr. Abu Safiya’s twenty-year-old son, Ibrahim. Dr. Abu Safiya buried his son on the hospital grounds and still refused to abandon the patients.

“The Israeli army does not know what it wants,” Dr. Abu Safiya told a reporter with The Electronic Intifada. “They detained me for a few hours and interrogated me about whether there were fighters inside the hospital, and demanded that I evacuate the hospital completely, but I refused and assured them that there were only patients inside the hospital. But fifty-seven of the hospital’s medical staff were arrested, (…) So we are suffering from a severe shortage of doctors, especially surgeons. Right now, we only have pediatricians — it is a huge challenge to work under these circumstances. I refused to leave the hospital and sacrifice my patients, so the army punished me by killing my son. I saw him die at the entrance gate — it was a great shock. I found a grave for him near one of the hospital’s walls, so that he could stay close to me.”

On December 27, 2024, when Israeli forces threatened to level the whole facility, Dr. Abu Safiya agreed to leave the hospital which was, by then, largely inoperable. An iconic video shows him, clad in his white coat, walking through the rubble toward two Israeli tanks.

He was held incommunicado, and then taken to the Sde Teiman prison, in the Negev desert, where he was interrogated and beaten before being transferred to the Ofer prison. There, he is held in solitary confinement. Only his lawyer has been allowed to visit him. She expresses rising alarm over his weight loss, inadequate health care, and frequent beatings.

Amnesty International says he has been forcibly disappeared and arbitrarily held without charge. Even though no charges have been brought against him, an Israeli court has extended his detention multiple times. On October 16, 2025, Israel’s Be’er Sheva District Court added an additional six months to his detention.

Who are the criminals? Israel and its partner, the United States, egregiously flaunt international law, committing numerous war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Dr. Abu Safiya endures daily punishments in return for his courageous dedication to serving victims of war.

In a better world, in a better future, we can hope that Palestinians graduating from medical school could assemble for an address delivered by Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. Together, they could uphold “the Humanity Cohort,” as the Gazan doctors who graduated in December 2025 call themselves, and safely commemoratethe courageous health care workers who risked and lost their lives to care for patients during an Israeli genocide that is still ongoing. Confident that health care is never a crime, they could cite their fallen colleagues’ historic and extraordinary adherence to the UN’s core mission, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

[Kathy Kelly, Board President of World BEYOND War, co-coordinates the November 2023 Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal. She is the author of Other Lands Have Dreams, published by CounterPunch/AK Press. Courtesy: CounterPunch, an online magazine based in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as “muckraking with a radical attitude”. It is edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.]