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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Why Israel Never Intended to
Respect the Gaza Ceasefire \u2013 Analysis</h1>
October 24, 2025</div>
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<div><font size="1">Two Palestinian teenagers were killed
by Israeli snipers, in another violation of the
ceasefire agreement. (Photo: via QNN)
</font>
<p><strong>By <a
href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/robert-inlakesh"
title="Display all articles for Robert Inlakesh"
moz-do-not-send="true">Robert Inlakesh</a></strong></p>
<blockquote>
<h3>Despite ceasefire agreements, Israel has no
intention to honor its side of the deal. It is
pursuing, in earnest, its goal following October 7,
to ethnically cleanse Gaza and to \u2018reshape\u2019 the
Middle East through brute force.</h3>
</blockquote>
<p>Israel has been committing daily violations of the
Gaza ceasefire and is currently hatching a scheme
designed to achieve its various goals through
different means. In reality, what has been imposed is
not a cessation of the war, or even a ceasefire;
instead, it is a clearly set agenda that is developing
into something more pernicious by the day.</p>
<p>While countless analysts had fallen into the trap of
believing that the \u201c20-point plan\u201d set forth by the US
Trump administration and the subsequent imposition of
a \u201cceasefire\u201d were actually designed with the
intention of ending the conflict in Gaza, we are
already seeing this notion fall apart, piece by piece.</p>
<h4><strong>Understanding Israel\u2019s Thinking</strong></h4>
<p>The issue here, in the mainstream discourse on Gaza
and which also injects itself into the alternative
media\u2019s framing, is a fundamental misunderstanding of
the nature of what is happening in Gaza. To some, this
may seem trivial and elementary yet, if the foundation
of one\u2019s ability to comprehend the issue at hand is
flawed, it will manifest itself in the broader
conclusions drawn.</p>
<p>While it is now widely accepted that genocide is what
Israel has inflicted on Gaza, it is important to
consider the implications of this understanding.
Genocide, in the case of Gaza, broadly speaking, means
the extermination of the population in part or whole,
which immediately does away with the notion that
Israel is simply fighting Hamas. Although this concept
is easily and widely understood, a thorough look at
what is happening is largely absent.</p>
<p>If Israel is committing genocide, which it
undoubtedly is, this conclusion begs a number of
questions. The most obvious is: Why?</p>
<p>Some would argue that the Israelis have committed
genocide in the Gaza Strip as an act of revenge, a
desire for blood and that this was motivated by the
acts carried out by Palestinian armed factions on
October 7, 2023. Yet, this argument makes little
sense.</p>
<p>It not only makes no sense from a post-October 7
perspective, but a historical one, too. If simply
revenge was the motivating factor, this would
completely discount the long history of Israeli
persecution of, and indiscriminate violence visited
upon, the Palestinian people. It also discounts the
objectives of Zionism, which is to conquer all of what
is deemed \u201cEretz Israel\u201d.</p>
<p>In the years leading up to October 7, 2023, the death
toll inside the West Bank was growing to the point
that it reached levels not seen since the Second
Intifada in the early 2000s. Israeli fanatical
settlers continuously encroached upon Al-Aqsa Mosque,
as Christian sites of worship also fell victim to
State-backed violence and restrictions.</p>
<p>Communities across the West Bank were under the
constant threat of ethnic cleansing, experiencing
routine pogroms carried out under the watchful eye of
the Israeli authorities, as the political echelon
sought to impose its de jure annexation over at least
Area C (60 percent) of the territory. Gaza\u2019s
population, meanwhile, living in a territory declared
by UN experts to have been unlivable by 2020, was left
to rot in a concentration camp.</p>
<p>Israel has visited various chapters of death and
destruction on the Gaza Strip, whether that be through
the inhuman siege over the past two decades, or the
various bombardments that murdered hundreds and, in
the worst cases, thousands, of civilians. This story
dates all the way back to 1948, when the Gaza Strip
was created out of the refugee population ethnically
cleansed from their lands, which the Zionists now call
Israel, where they have since experienced every
hardship imaginable at the hands of their Israeli
oppressors.</p>
<p>In 2014, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
tried, through a 51-day war of aggression, to find an
answer to what Israel has called its \u201cGaza question\u201d,
but failed to find any kind of military solution.
When, for instance, the Israeli military attempted to
go after the Hamas tunnel infrastructure and engaged
directly with the Palestinian resistance, they
suffered heavy casualties and four of their soldiers
were seized as prisoners of war.</p>
<p>Come 2017, Hamas was both put under strain and also
birthed a number of initiatives that sought to achieve
political goals through compromise and non-violence.
The movement issued a new Charter that accepted a
long-term ceasefire settlement that would achieve a
\u201cTwo-State\u201d solution, additionally condemning
anti-Semitism, amongst other things.</p>
<p>Hamas also began the process that year of signing a
unity deal with the Palestinian Authority (PA),
whereby the Ramallah-based authority was set to take
over the governance of Gaza. To this effect, PA forces
even began to be deployed to the Rafah border, amidst
broad celebrations across the Gaza Strip. Yet, the US
and Israel applied pressure that collapsed the
agreement.</p>
<p>Later that year, the PA began reducing and slashing
the salaries of its employees in Gaza, placing even
greater strain on Hamas, eventually leading to Israel
setting up its controversial Qatari aid delivery
system, used to stop the situation from boiling over
into a larger-scale conflict or tit-for-tat that would
cause issues, particularly for the surrounding Israeli
settlements.</p>
<p>In 2018, Hamas even threw its weight behind the Great
March of Return. Many do not know this, but while
Hamas used to respond to Israel\u2019s routine airstrikes
across Gaza, up until November 11, when Israel
attempted and failed to kidnap a senior Hamas
commander in Gaza, the movement did not even fire
rockets in retaliation to Israeli aggression.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the doctrine of non-violence resulted in
the murder of hundreds of civilians and a health
system crisis where tens of thousands suffered
injuries. The Western mainstream media lied for
Israel, claiming that the protests were riots and that
Israel was defending its \u201cborder\u201d, neither of which
was true.</p>
<p>Time and time again, Hamas had tried to find a
solution to Gaza\u2019s unlivable predicament, yet the
Israelis were set on leaving the territory there as an
unfixable problem, which could be contained through
periodic massacres and assassinations of leaders,
something that had been happening for decades, beyond
just the major wars in 2008-9, 2012, 2014, and 2021.</p>
<p>Instead, the Israelis were chasing the expansion of
the \u201cAbraham Accords\u201d to include Saudi Arabia and
others, killing what was known as the \u201cArab Peace
Initiative\u201d, a plan set forth by Riyadh that set a
Palestinian State based upon the 1967 borders as a
pre-requisite for normalization.</p>
<p>By October 7, 2023, Israel was pushing forward with
its West Bank annexation efforts, had been expanding
its ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem and had
sidelined Gaza. When Hamas launched operation Al-Aqsa
Flood, it collapsed Israel\u2019s southern command, dealt
the strongest military blow Israel had ever
experienced and shook up the entire surrounding region
also.</p>
<p>The Israelis saw it very clearly that two things had
just occurred, leading to polar opposite paths. Israel
now had its \u201cre-birth\u201d or disintegration moment to
deal with. Exactly what Israel\u2019s senior leadership
asserted about their intentions for Gaza is precisely
what they began pursuing, and still are, after two
years.</p>
<p>In their eyes, the whole game changed. It was time to
accelerate their plans that were designed to play out
over a decade; now had come their opportunity to
\u201csolve the Gaza question\u201d and \u201creshape the Middle
East\u201d through brute force.</p>
<p>This is why Israel has spent so much time demolishing
Gaza as part of its genocide. Still, today, its
military, along with private Israeli civilian
contractors who are paid danger money for their work,
are demolishing the remaining Palestinian civilian
infrastructure that remains behind what Israel calls
the \u201cYellow Line\u201d (54-58 percent of Gaza).</p>
<p>Logically, if the Israelis have just committed
genocide and are currently continuing to not only
murder civilians daily, but demolish the remaining
buildings in the Gaza Strip, does it make any sense
that they have accepted an end to the conflict? Such a
conclusion would be somewhat delusional.</p>
<p>What Israel is doing is sticking to its war goals,
which it sought to achieve on October 7, 2023.
Although some are able to see this clearly, they make
another key mistake in their understanding of the
current predicament, that is, that this plan is
localized to Palestine, or even just Gaza.</p>
<p>This was the same mistake that many regional players,
as part of the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance, made.
Only upon the assassination of Hezbollah leader,
Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, did this element of Israel\u2019s
overarching scheme fully sink in, as many were misled
to believe that Gaza was the only true target.</p>
<p>In the eyes of the Israelis, if the people of Gaza
are still there, then eventually resistance will
return, and the issue will go back to the start, once
again. Logically, this also makes sense, given what
the Israelis have done to the people there, the desire
for revenge and resistance will only have grown, even
if all the armed groups there are disarmed and the
next wave of resistance takes decades to manifest
itself.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, an even bigger threat lurks to the north,
where Hezbollah still very much exists. Although
propagandists claim that the group is over, the
Israeli leadership understands this not to be the
case.</p>
<p>As many argue that Hezbollah is \u201cdone\u201d, consider the
following: Hamas was not even a fraction of the
military force that Hezbollah currently is \u2013 even in a
weaker state \u2013 on October 7, 2023, yet still managed
to collapse Israel\u2019s southern command and its fighters
were carrying out operations across the separation
barrier for at least two days after the initial
attack.</p>
<p>If Hezbollah so chose to, it could undoubtedly
deliver severe blows against the Israelis. In fact, if
Hezbollah\u2019s fighters were to prove capable of
penetrating the borders and entering the Galilee, such
a military disaster for Israel would represent an
undoing of the objectives it sought to achieve through
its genocide in Gaza.</p>
<p>The Gaza genocide was a strategy, one to completely
destroy the territory and inflict a defeat upon the
Palestinian national resistance, through mass
slaughter, to demoralize them, and make it impossible
for the people to remain living inside Gaza. It was
also a message to the regional resistance and the Arab
world, in general, that if you challenge Israel
militarily, you will suffer the same fate.</p>
<p>The Israelis are not about to sit around and wait for
a resistance force to develop inside Syria, for the
Lebanese resistance to strengthen itself to a degree
where it will become a force capable of \u201cdeterrence\u201d,
or to allow for Iran to occupy the same counterweight
to it regionally that it did prior to October 7, 2023.
\u201cTotal victory\u201d is what Benjamin Netanyahu constantly
reiterates as his goal and, even after the ceasefire
was imposed in Gaza, he openly stated that \u201cthe war is
not over\u201d.</p>
<h4><strong>The Impossible \u2018Peace Plan\u2019</strong></h4>
<p>Israel, for years, not only among its leading
political parties but its Jewish population at large,
has rejected the notion of even negotiating for a
Palestinian State on a mere 22 percent of historic
Palestine. The only major issue standing in Israel\u2019s
way was the Palestinian population still living there
and the regional military alliance that stood for its
cause and encouraged armed struggle.</p>
<p>In January of 2020, US President Donald Trump
revealed what he called his \u201cDeal of the Century\u201d
plan. If you look at the details of it, this aligns
not only with previous proposals set forth by Israel\u2019s
Likud Party, that were not taken seriously by the
Americans, at that point, but also with the so-called
\u201cPeace Deal\u201d that is being proposed today.</p>
<p>It is to say that a divided series of cantons, or
mini-concentration camps, be set up under a
Palestinian Authority-led administration. A plan under
which the Jordan Valley area and other portions of
Area C in the West Bank will be annexed, occupied
Jerusalem will be seized entirely by Israel, and Abu
Dis, located East of Jerusalem behind Israel\u2019s Wall of
separation, will be the de facto Palestinian capital.
Trump\u2019s current proposal takes the \u201cDeal of the
Century\u201d and strips it down even further.</p>
<p>While the Europeans and Arab nations propose a
Palestinian \u201cState\u201d, with East Jerusalem as its
capital, offering their so-called \u201cNew York
Declaration\u201d as a framework, the Trump administration
has accepted this vision with two primary caveats, so
far: No actual Palestinian State, no capital in
occupied East Jerusalem.</p>
<p>The New York Declaration initiative, put together by
Saudi Arabia and France, declares that so-called
\u201cnon-State actors\u201d will be drowned out of the picture
and are to be barred from the political process; in
other words, only their favored candidates from the
mainstream branch of Fatah will be considered valid
for elections. This means no democracy.</p>
<p>The Saudi-French vision also states that Palestine
must be demilitarized, making it the only State on
earth barred from having an army. There would be no
repercussions for Israel\u2019s genocide, of course; in
fact, they will be rewarded under this vision.
Palestine will also be a State whereby the leadership
will have no say over its own education program,
instead adopting a foreign-Israeli re-education
program.</p>
<p>As laid out during French President Emmanuel Macron\u2019s
United Nations General Assembly speech, this
initiative also demands the disarmament of Hamas and
the introduction of an international force that would
enter Gaza, only under the strict conditions and
coordination of the Israelis.</p>
<p>It suffices to say that both proposals, from the US
and its allies, are very similar, except that one
seeks to please the corrupt Palestinian Authority
officials who currently partially run the affairs of
the West Bank.</p>
<p>Interestingly enough, the Palestinian Authority (PA)
and its unelected President, Mahmoud Abbas, are only
relevant today because of Hamas, despite their public
statements blaming Hamas for almost everything that
has happened since October 7, 2023. If it were not for
Hamas, there would be no recognition of Palestine. No
Arab, US, and European money on the table for the
corrupted clique of elites based out of Ramallah,
nothing.</p>
<p>While the PA buried the Palestinian cause, hijacked
its leadership and turned it into an international
money-grabbing laughing stock amongst serious
political actors, the armed movements it opposes so
virulently are the ones propelling the cause to the
world.</p>
<p>Many may ask why the Palestinian national movement is
incapable of seizing this moment, when the world
collectively sides with their struggle; the answer is
the corruption of the Palestinian Authority. It is
that simple.</p>
<p>And this does not mean petty corruption, like
nepotism or certain individuals benefiting financially
from the system, but rather the complete selling out
of the cause altogether. All major movements,
governments and interim authorities have these sorts
of issues to one extent or another; it is simply
because human beings are fallible.</p>
<p>This critique is also starkly different from those
historically made against the Fatah Party, from other
members of the PLO and even some groups that operated
outside of it. The PA of today does not hold a candle
to the PLO of old. It is not just an administration
with issues, like those associated with
neo-partimonialism, political miscalculations or
signing agreements that were designed to damage the
Palestinian people; it is a corrupt regime that works
as the occupiers\u2019 subcontractor. It functions as a
house-slave.</p>
<p>Back to the Israelis and the plan. The chances of
them adhering to it are slim to nothing, unless the US
were to somehow put its foot down and force them to,
which is highly unlikely, as Washington is giving the
green light to each of their violations, never daring
to even challenge them.</p>
<p>If the Israelis were serious about reconstruction,
then why have they created and continue to employ
civilians from the private sector to demolish
Palestinian infrastructure in Gaza every day? If they
were serious about a \u201ctechnocratic\u201d Palestinian
governing force in Gaza, then why are they continuing
to back three major ISIS-linked proxy groups behind
the Yellow Line?</p>
<p>According to Axios News, the US is giving a green
light to an Israeli strategy whereby they will begin
using reconstruction funds to build structures in the
areas of Gaza they control. This plan would then offer
civilians to live there under the occupation of the
Israelis and their criminal proxy groups.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Israel continues to prevent the bare
necessities from entering the Gaza Strip. The
so-called ceasefire agreement was supposed to allow
400 aid trucks to enter per day for the first five
days, then 600 plus afterward. Israel even reportedly
committed to 600 per day. So far, around 90 trucks
have entered per day on average, as Gaza continues to
suffer severe food shortages across the besieged
territory.</p>
<p>If the Israelis cannot even help themselves from
slaughtering over 100 civilians, so far, and blocking
aid, what chance is there that they will allow a
legitimate political entity to function, let alone
permit reconstruction? They would not even allow the
heavy equipment into Gaza that was needed to quickly
and safely extract the bodies of its dead captives,
which are buried under the rubble created by their own
bombs.</p>
<p>If we turn back to 2014, the Israelis were also
supposed to allow the reconstruction of Gaza, yet they
also banned the entry of the desperately needed
equipment and materials then, too. It took the
ingenuity of the people to overcome this hurdle at the
time.</p>
<p>This ceasefire agreement was never created to end the
genocide or pave the way to peace. Prussian military
theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, is often quoted as
stating that \u201cwar is the continuation of politics by
other means\u201d, which can be applied here.</p>
<p>The Israelis have clear goals of conquering what they
view as \u201cGreater Israel\u201d. As of now, they are
pursuing, through political means, their schemes to
de-fang the resistance and will proceed to war, when
they deem necessary. Israel must be defeated by the
regional resistance, or it will keep going until it
achieves its \u201ctotal victory\u201d.</p>
<div>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><span><em>\u2013 Robert Inlakesh is a journalist,
writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on
the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He
contributed this article to The Palestine
Chronicle. </em></span></p>
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