Eight months ago, the world was told the war on Gaza was
over. A ceasefire. A hostage exchange. A twenty-point plan,
endorsed by the UN Security Council, backed by a new
international body with a grand name: the Board of Peace.
Officials queued up to call it historic. For people who have
spent two years burying their children in scraps of cloth
because there was nothing else, “historic” felt, for a
moment, like it might mean something.
It
hasn’t.
The plan on paper
The framework that
became Security Council Resolution 2803 promised a lot: an
end to hostilities, the return of every hostage, a surge in
humanitarian aid, and a phased path toward Palestinian
self-governance in Gaza under international supervision. The
living hostages came home within days. That part worked,
because it was the part the guarantors actually wanted to
work.
Everything harder than that has
stalled.
The plan on the ground
Since the
ceasefire was declared, Israeli strikes inside Gaza have
killed more than a thousand Palestinians. Six people were
killed in a single week this month alone: a drone strike on
a displacement camp, gunfire elsewhere in the Strip while
the word “ceasefire” sat in quotation marks in every report
describing it. Israeli forces now control roughly 80 percent
of the territory, expanding steadily beyond the line the
truce was supposed to fix in place. Families near that line
are being pushed from their homes again, in what is meant to
be peace.
Advertisement – scroll to continue reading
Ninety percent of Gaza’s civilian
infrastructure lies in ruins. Hospitals, water systems,
schools, mosques and churches are gone or unusable. The
famine that a tightened blockade produced hasn’t been undone
by a piece of paper signed in Washington. Aid still moves at
the pace the occupying power allows it to move.
And
the political horizon the plan promised Palestinian
governance, a route to statehood, a say for Palestinians in
their own future has quietly narrowed to something else
entirely. One version on offer involves “alternative safe
communities”: walled compounds under Israeli military
control, each holding twenty to twenty-five thousand people,
administered rather than governed. Another version, unveiled
with a straight face by a property developer, imagined
Gaza’s ruins rebuilt as seaside resorts and skyscrapers, a
real-estate pitch delivered over a mass grave. Neither is
self-determination. Both were drawn up without the people
whose lives they claim to plan.
Meanwhile in the West
Bank, settler violence keeps climbing and the Palestinian
Authority grows weaker by the month, sidelined and
discredited in the eyes of the people it’s supposed to
represent.
So what went wrong?
Not one thing.
The same thing that has gone wrong for decades: a peace
process built to manage the appearance of a conflict rather
than resolve its cause. Disarmament is demanded of the side
under siege before occupation is lifted from the side doing
the besieging. Reconstruction is promised, then re-imagined
as real estate. Self-governance is offered, then redefined
as supervised containment. A body called the “Board of
Peace” is chaired by the same government that has spent two
years arming one side of the war it claims to be
ending.
This is not a plan that failed by accident. It
is a plan that was never built to deliver what it promised
because delivering it would have meant treating Palestinians
as a people with a right to determine their own future, not
a population to be managed until the cameras move
on.
What doesn’t go wrong
What has never
wavered, through every ceasefire and every collapse of one,
is Palestinian sumud steadfastness. People who have lost
everything and are still refusing to leave. Journalists are
still filming. Doctors are still operating without
anaesthetic. Families still naming their newborns after the
ones they buried, so the name carries on.
Solidarity
from the outside doesn’t get to be passive while that
continues. It means saying plainly, in public, what went
wrong and who kept it that way and it means not letting the
word “ceasefire” launder what is still, by any honest
reading of the last eight months, an occupation tightening
its grip under a different name.
The plan on paper was
never the point. The plan on the ground is the one
Palestinians are still living through. That is where
solidarity has to meet
them.
