This was peace. An unconditional surrender. No guarantees. One solution to Netanyahu’s main problem: the release of the hostages. There aren’t any anymore. There are bodies left under the rubble, a mix of Palestinians and Israelis. Tom Fletcher, the UN’s director of humanitarian operations, said it could take months to recover and identify the 13 buried Israeli hostages. As for the Palestinian deaths, these details are not even contemplated: experts such as Francesca Albanese, UN rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, have long warned that the official figures of deaths in Gaza (71,200, the latest) could multiply by 10 if missing people and those killed from indirect causes, such as hunger and diseases resulting from war, were added to the direct victims. But their names and their stories barely appear, they are destined to be “perfect victims”, as the Jerusalem writer Mohamed El-Kurd denounced on these same pages a few days ago.
The thread of Israeli attacks has not stopped since, on 13 October, the United States, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey signed the declaration in Sharm El Sheikh that guaranteed the agreement between Hamas and Israel, in a scenario to the greater glory of the American president but without the presence of those directly involved: Netanyahu, willing to go, was stopped by Donald Trump due to the Turkish threat to blow up the signature if the Israeli prime minister intervened; On the Palestinian side, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian National Authority, was so out of touch with reality that you had to look for him in the family photo. However, Trump proclaimed that “we have peace in the Middle East,” and the 20 points that left the future of Gaza in his hands were called the Peace Plan, including the crumbs of humanitarian aid: of the 600 daily trucks expected, only 89 have come into force since the ceasefire came into force. At the Rafah crossing, the closed border with Egypt in the hands of Israel, more than 25 kilometers of convoys await.
Trump has always been clear: Israel will have the right to react and this will not jeopardize the truce. Pure Trumpian jargon, pure MAGA neorealism.
We were waiting for the “Israeli attack”. That is, from an official declaration from the Netanyahu government that it would do what it was already doing: bomb Gaza again. We expected the death toll to once again be as scandalous as it was approximate. And here they are: more than a hundred, half of them children. But what surpasses everything that has already been seen, if that were possible, is the betrayal: the Israeli government announced, after Tuesday’s attack, that it will “re-enforce the ceasefire”. And a few hours later it bombed again. Hamas delivers the wrong bodies and the Israeli army bombs the camps and tents of displaced people. This is the equation for the Israeli government. It’s free.
If the agreement had one virtue for the Palestinians, it was the cessation of attacks and deaths. It was the only good thing for them. Not even that anymore.
