Millions yearn for a complete end to the war, but Netanyahu’s government of death has its own plans
Continue to build the fight against Netanyahu’s government of death and austerity in order to prevent it from violating the agreement; demand a complete end to the war, the release of “all for all”, the withdrawal of all military forces from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank, and the expropriation of resources from the capitalists for reconstruction and welfare!
After over 460 hellish days of war of extermination and bloodbath in Gaza, a ceasefire that will also facilitate a hostage-prisoner exchange was announced.
This comes more than one year after the short ceasefire and exchange of prisoners of November 2023. The new ceasefire which has been announced will begin on Sunday (January 19), when a prisoner exchange will also take place.
The announcement is met with a sense of mass relief. In the temporary displaced persons camps in the Gaza Strip, the residents who managed to survive the terrible war of extermination reacted to the announcement of the expected ceasefire with spontaneous celebrations. At the same time, voices of relief and joy were also heard at the permanent protest HQ of the families of the abductees in front of the Begin gate at Kriya base in Tel Aviv.
The global and regional movement must continue, demanding a complete end to the war. Millions in the region, and first and foremost the Palestinian masses living through the inferno in the Gaza Strip, yearn to see the end of the hell that the Israeli government of death has imposed on them for 15 months. Millions in Israel also wish for the end of the war, and the return of the abductees.
Netanyahu’s government ‘death cabinet’ (war cabinet) has approved — despite the opposition of far-right ministers Ben-Gvir and Smotrich — a ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal outline, which is not fundamentally different from the outline it has rejected time and time again since May. This fact in itself constitutes an admission that the Netanyahu gang has had no way of bringing about the release of the abductees, other than with a cease-fire agreement.
However, for many months they chose to reject outright the outline they are currently adopting “in favor” of a series of provocative assassinations in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon and Iran, demonstrative attacks throughout the Middle East and murderous military raids in Rafah and the refugee camps in the center and north of the Gaza Strip and the creation of famine conditions. Now, the government will cynically use the rivers of blood it has shed, and the arrogant backing it receives from the incoming Trump administration, to foster an image of having signed an agreement with the Hamas leadership from a position of strength. This is an attempt to obscure and prettify the strategic crisis which forces it to now come to terms with the same Hamas they swore to “eliminate”.
Contrary to the government’s lies, the “military pressure” — or in its unwashed name, the war of extermination — did not prepare the ground for a deal but only exacerbated and deepened the bloody crisis. In the same inferno in which tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children perished in Gaza, dozens of abductees who were abducted from the Western Negev on October 7, 2023 also perished.
“This war was never just about bombing” said 37-year-old Wadiha al-Attar, who lost 30 relatives in the war. “It’s also been about starvation, lack of food and clothing, of the complete absence of peace of mind. Let them end the war, let them open the crossings, let them bring food, and let us see our loved ones and return to northern Gaza! Let us rebuild our houses after they have been completely destroyed.”
At the same time, hundreds of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza are looking forward to the possibility of being reunited with their relatives who are expected to be released from Israeli prisons and torture camps as part of the deal. Many of them, including women and children, were abducted from their beds by masked gunmen in the dead of night, or disappeared in arrest operations (kidnappings) carried out by the Israeli occupation forces in the Gaza Strip during the war.
“Joy mixed with sadness”
But anticipation and excitement are mixed with apprehension and fear. First of all, in the Gaza Strip, the heavy bombardment may continue throughout the weekend and claim the lives of many more. The rate of carnage is now increasing: between the announcement of the ceasefire agreement on Wednesday evening and Friday (Jan 17), 71 people have been killed in bombings on the Strip, including 19 children and 24 women. But even after the ceasefire comes into effect, the danger of a renewal of the war continues to hover over the heads of residents. As with the ceasefire deal in Lebanon in November, the Israeli government will claim that all new attacks are within the rules of the deal.
“It’s joy mixed with sadness,” explains Maha, a 34-year-old resident of Khan Younis “Every day that passes costs us blood. People are killed. The break will allow us to gauge the extent of the loss and destruction. I want to see my father and mother, look for the family members who were killed and maybe find their bodies.”
“The Forum of Families of Israeli Hostages” warned that “in the face of the reports of an imminent agreement, and alongside the expectation of the return of our loved ones, anxiety and heavy concern accompany us, in view of the possibility that the agreement will not be completed in full, and that some of the abductees will remain in captivity.”
Indeed, Netanyahu’s bloody government insists on not committing to a complete end to the war and the withdrawal of all occupation forces from the Strip. Bezalel Smotrich, Chairman of the Religious Zionism party even insists that the condition for his party to remain in the government is: “absolute certainty of a return to war with great force, on a full scale and in a new configuration.”
The agreed outline is divided in advance into phases. It begins with a temporary ceasefire of about 6 weeks during which time the second phase of the arrangement is not yet agreed — its details are supposed to be concluded, apparently, in negotiations that will begin at the end of January, on the 16th day for the execution of the first phase.
As part of the first phase of the agreement, the stranglehold of the siege and starvation is expected to be eased with the permission for about 600 trucks of food, medicine, and fuel per day to enter the Strip. Hamas is expected to gradually release 33 Israeli abductees, including all the women (soldiers and civilians), children, and men over the age of 50. In return, among other things, all the minors and women who have been arrested, actually kidnapped, from Gaza since October 7th will be released, and hundreds more Palestinian male and female prisoners will be released from the prisons and torture camps of the Israeli occupation. Some will be deported to Gaza or other countries in the region.
According to the main document of the agreement that was leaked, the Israeli occupation forces will gradually move out of the population centers in the Gaza Strip and be deployed along a “buffer zone”, with a depth of about 700 meters from the fence, and at certain points (to be determined by the Israeli army) even more than a kilometer into the Gaza Strip. Displaced Palestinians will be allowed to cross the Netzer enclave and Wadi Gaza to the north and return to Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip starting on February 7, when vehicles will be inspected “by a private company determined by the mediators in coordination with the Israeli side, and according to an agreed upon mechanism.”
According to the document, the Israeli army will remain on the Salah al-Din/Philadelphia axis on the Gaza-Sinai border throughout the first phase of the deal, will begin to withdraw from it, apparently, starting on the 42nd day (the end of the first phase) and will complete the withdrawal by the 50th day of the ceasefire. However, Israeli “senior political official” stated on Thursday afternoon that Israeli military forces will withdraw from the Philadelphia axis only if Hamas agrees to “Israel’s demand for the end of the war (fulfillment of the war’s goals)” — that is, if Hamas agrees to the Israel’s death cabinet’s war goals, including the elimination of Hamas itself. This is an opening to escape the agreement and renew the war.
The second phase, which is unlikely to materialize and the details of which are not agreed as previously mentioned, is expected to last 42 more days and include the release of all the remaining living abductees, a permanent ceasefire and the complete withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces from the Strip. The third stage, will include, apparently, the release of all the bodies of the remaining abductees and the beginning of the implementation of the Gaza rehabilitation plan.
Will the ceasefire last?
According to a publication of an Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, on the eve of the announcement of the agreement: “President Trump, according to a source familiar with the details, has already promised Netanyahu and Minister Ron Dermer that if they agree to a cease-fire and the withdrawal of IDF forces from the Strip, he will support Israel retroactively if it decides to return to fighting and violates the cease-fire”.
Trump is indeed interested in an achievement upon entering the White House and pressured the Netanyahu government, at the same time as threatening to impose “hell” on Gaza and the region, to agree to a temporary ceasefire deal. But what guarantees exist that he will pressure the Netanyahu government to continue beyond the first phase of the agreement, withdraw all occupation forces from the Strip and end the war completely?
Although Trump has made it clear that he is interested in a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which would require the end of the war of extermination in Gaza, his policy could certainly continue the line of his first term: increased support for the military aggression of the Israeli occupation regime. He has promised to increase the supply of weapons to the war machine of Israeli capitalism, threatened to lead a joint attack on Iran and, according to reports, also to authorize the government of death to maximize the starvation in the Gaza Strip.
The danger that the government of death will return to maximum “military pressure” measures in the Strip, including starvation and the destruction of vital infrastructure, with the backing of the Trump administration, is ever-present. The danger of regional war is also not going anywhere, when officials in the government and the military-security establishment want to take advantage of the ceasefire in Gaza to promote a military attack on the oil and nuclear facilities in Iran.
Faced with this danger, there is an urgency to continue building a struggle for a complete end to the war, the release of all for all, for the restoration and welfare and the overthrow of the government of death, as part of a broad struggle against the entirety of its agenda.
The Minister of Finance and Chairman of the Religious Zionism party, Bezalel Smotrich, announced on Wednesday evening after the announcement of the outline that “for the past two days the Prime Minister and I have been having heated discussions on the matter, he knows what the demands of Religious Zionism are and the ball is in his hands.”
It is not yet known whether Smotrich will respond to Ben Gvir’s call to resign together from the government in an attempt to stop the deal. The meetings between Netanyahu and Smotrich were aimed at convincing the latter not to resign from the government, with promises, among other things as far as is known according to reports, to deepen the occupation in the West Bank and massive construction in the settlements as part of the acceleration of ethnic cleansing in the area.
Build the struggle
The “day after” of the government of death and the Trump administration is the continuation of hell for the masses. The Israeli regime made it clear throughout the war of extermination that even after the end of the current phase of the inferno, the occupying forces will continue to control the territory for years to come. They plan to reorganize the occupation and control of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip with daily military raids “like in the West Bank”, in the words of the Minister of War Katz, all while making attacks on democratic rights within the Green Line, alongside austerity measures and economic decrees that will also continue to fuel the erosion of wages and the cost of living in Israel.
The attempt to re-impose more firmly the status quo of occupation, national oppression, poverty and the rule of capital will lead to new catastrophes. Faced with this danger, the struggle must be escalated, with a broad mobilization for demonstrations and even strike action against the government of death and austerity in order to prevent it from violating the agreement, to demand a complete end to the war, the release of all for all, the withdrawal of all military forces from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank, and the expropriation of resources from capitalists in favor of real rehabilitation and welfare. The struggle to overthrow the government of death must be connected to the need for a radical change in order to uproot the fundamental causes of the bloody crisis — a struggle for liberation from national oppression, the occupation, the siege and the poverty suffered by millions and for an alternative of socialist change to the capitalist system that perpetuates imperialist wars, oppression and exploitation.
