#israel-gaza-relations

#israel-gaza-relations

What America and Israel are doing in their aggression against the countries of the region is not a war of a military nature, but a senseless war, said Dhirgham Samir, a demonstrator in his 40s.

Taybeh, a small hilltop town in the heart of the West Bank, is one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, now feeling under siege and fighting for its existence.

The plan would see disarmament as one of the components of the October ceasefire to end Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, implemented gradually over an eight-month, multiphase process.

Taking centre stage is Josh Paul, former director of congressional and public affairs at the US Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. In 2023, Paul resigned in protest over the US's role in enabling Israel's war on Gaza. Since then, he has co-founded A New Policy, a political organisation pushing for change in US policy towards Palestine and Israel.

While the world's attention is on the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, the Israeli military has placed the West Bank under a functional lockdown. Checkpoints in and out of most major cities are closed, and Palestinians have been left to look for other travel arrangements. Some residents who spoke with Truthout said they traveled for hours through village back roads in an attempt to reach their destinations.

Rafah is the only crossing that connects Gaza to the outside world without passing through Israel, and it has been a vital passage for the delivery of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of patients and the wounded.

In October, Hamas and Israel signed a peace deal supposedly intended to stop two years of slaughter in Gaza. Since then, more than 420 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire-an average of about four people a day-in what international mediators continue to describe as a successful de-escalation. The distance between that official narrative and the facts on the ground reveals how the language of ceasefire has been repurposed: It no longer describes a pause in violence but rather a mechanism for managing it, sanitizing ongoing military force under the guise of restraint.

Hamas's political leader abroad, Khaled Meshaal, has rejected calls to disarm Palestinian factions in Gaza, arguing that stripping weapons from an occupied people would turn them into an easy victim to be eliminated. Speaking on the second day of the Al Jazeera Forum in Doha on Sunday, Meshaal described the discussion around Hamas handing over its weapons as a continuation of a century-long effort to neutralise Palestinian armed resistance.

Through a new land registration drive, Israel is trying to secure through paperwork what warfare alone has failed to deliver. Israel always had a plan to annex more land in the occupied West Bank, and its actions prove it. This week, the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to claim Palestinian lands in the West Bank as state land. The proposal, pushed by far-right Israeli leaders, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Defence Minister Israel Katz, emphasises Israeli supremacy over Palestinians.

He said it twice, to leave no room for doubt. on Tuesday, in the Israeli parliament, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear that, following the recovery of the body of the last hostage in Gaza, the next phase of the ceasefire is not the reconstruction of the devastated Strip, but the disarmament of Hamas and the demilitarization of Gaza.