---

“They make a desert and call it peace.” Tacitus’s words echo powerfully across Gaza after the cease-fire declared on 10 October 2025, presented globally as a fragile pause after nearly two years of relentless bombardment. Diplomats welcomed the announcement, headlines expressed relief, and humanitarian corridors briefly reopened. To many outside, it appeared as a return to calm. For Palestinians, however, it felt like another short pause within a much longer siege, a silence learned to be met with caution rather than comfort. The question remains unresolved: whether this truce signals a path toward justice or simply marks another interval in a familiar cycle of destruction.

Within weeks, that fragile calm collapsed. Israeli strikes killed more than a hundred Palestinians, including many children. Hospitals and tent camps were heavily damaged, laying bare how humanitarian assurances failed to translate into real safety on the ground. Promised measures such as aid delivery, prisoner exchanges, and the return of displaced families stalled amid renewed devastation. Frantz Fanon’s warning rings true here, that when justice is absent, peace becomes only a pause between wars. This cease-fire once again followed a familiar pattern, restoring the rhythms of occupation rather than producing any meaningful structural change.

Palestine’s modern history has long unfolded through recurring episodes of displacement and domination. Since the Nakba of 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, each truce has simply shifted the contours of suffering. What began as mass expulsion gradually evolved into an enduring process of erasure, from the occupation of 1967 to the blockade of Gaza and the repeated assaults of 2008 to 2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, and 2023 to 2024. Every so-called cease-fire followed the same sequence: devastation, global outrage, limited restraint, and then renewed violence.

Human Rights Watch has described this reality as a system of systematic oppression and domination, while B’Tselem has named it apartheid. These temporary pauses rarely move society closer to justice. Instead, they allow political and territorial consolidation by the occupying power. Angela Davis’s reminder that freedom is a constant struggle remains painfully relevant here. Desmond Tutu’s warning about neutrality in the face of injustice also applies, as global inaction continues to sustain this cycle, a pattern that appears deliberate rather than accidental.

Israel’s military campaigns are not sudden reactions to isolated provocations. They function as tools for maintaining an entrenched system of control. Each assault is justified through the language of security, yet that language masks a broader project of regulating land, movement, and Palestinian lives. Since 1967, more than two hundred settlements have been constructed across occupied territories, alongside near-total control over borders, water resources, and airspace. In this framework, security becomes an excuse for domination. Edward Said cautioned that peace itself can become the most effective disguise for occupation.

This logic is reinforced politically through settlement expansion and restrictive policies that severely limit Palestinian development. Under Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, shaped by ultranationalist ideology, siege and retaliation have become central political tools. Gaza’s blockade, which restricts electricity, food, and medicine, functions as collective punishment against civilians. When resistance inevitably emerges from this reality, it is immediately labeled illegitimate, providing justification for further assaults. IlanPappé’s observation captures this dynamic clearly: Israel does not seek peace but quiet, a quiet occupation. As long as peace is defined by dominance, it remains nothing more than enforced silence.

For people in Gaza, every truce is experienced as a brief breath between bombardments, a silence filled with grief. The October cease-fire, like those before it, did not heal wounds. It merely allowed families to bury their dead and assess their losses. Gaza remains largely in ruins, with hospitals destroyed, neighborhoods erased, and survivors caught between trauma and the struggle to endure. United Nations reports estimate that more than 37,000 people have been killed since October 2023, most of them civilians, while over 80 percent of the population has been displaced. These outcomes are not accidental. They reflect a deeper structure of dehumanization. As Arundhati Roy observed, dissent may be the only thing worth globalizing, yet in Gaza it is buried beneath rubble and official rhetoric.

Despite this, life persists. As Mahmoud Darwish wrote, there remains on this earth what makes life worth living. Daily acts of rebuilding, learning, and survival become quiet forms of resistance. Still, when political rights are ignored, humanitarian aid becomes a temporary patch rather than a real solution. Without justice following cease-fires, Gaza’s population remains suspended between repeated destruction and fragile survival.

Every attempt at peace collapses under entrenched geopolitical interests, ideology, and unequal power dynamics. Strategic alliances, military support, and diplomatic protection make the status quo both profitable and politically convenient for powerful actors. As Noam Chomsky noted, Israel is treated as a strategic asset rather than a moral question. More than 700,000 settlers now live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, fragmenting the land and steadily erasing the foundation of a viable Palestinian state. When cease-fires are treated as acceptable management of violence instead of a demand for rights, meaningful change becomes unlikely.

Beyond the checkpoints exists a broader web of global complicity. Powerful states continue to arm and shield Israel diplomatically, offering statements of concern without consequences, while normalization proceeds quietly. Internal Palestinian political divisions weaken collective resistance, while external military and diplomatic backing strengthens Israeli expansion. Fanon described colonialism as violence in its natural state. In Palestine, that violence has been formalized as policy. Cease-fires then become diplomatic performances, stabilizing injustice just enough for it to endure.

The most recent cease-fire, like many before it, provided a short reprieve rather than real transformation. More than 66,000 Palestinians have been killed in the latest extended assault, Gaza remains devastated, and humanitarian needs are overwhelming. Children grow up recognizing sirens more readily than lullabies, and families rebuild only to face loss again. These pauses do not allow healing. They deepen exhaustion. Darwish once wrote that even what makes life worth living is continually stolen by the guns of occupation, and hope itself must learn to survive amid ruins.

Each truce is celebrated as progress yet ultimately serves as recovery time for the occupying power. Settlements expand, the blockade tightens, and the world’s attention fades until the next catastrophe. Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us that peace is not the absence of tension but the presence of justice. True peace will not emerge from repeated pauses in violence, but from dismantling the structures that sustain oppression. Until that moment arrives, when cease-fires no longer substitute for freedom, Palestine’s struggle will remain unending, striving to turn mere survival into sovereignty.

Disclaimer: Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy