Fishermen of Gaza — by Norman Harman
Throughout the war on Gaza, Israel has presented the Palestinian resistance’s rejection of each ceasefire as a “rejection of peace,” as the Palestinians opting for their own genocide. Each time the resistance has accepted, Israel has taken that acceptance as confirmation that its pressure is working, and has answered with more force.
In May 2024, the United States, Egypt, and Qatar presented Hamas with a ceasefire proposal. Hamas accepted on May 6. That same day, Israel launched its ground assault on Rafah. Netanyahu called the ceasefire proposal “far from Israel’s basic requirements” and a “failed attempt to torpedo Israel’s entry into Rafah,” then sent a delegation to Cairo while the Israeli army advanced. Over the following year, Israel erased Rafah, demolishing its buildings by the tens of thousands and making the ground uninhabitable, leaving no city behind.
When diplomatic or popular pressure against the genocide mounts, the United States brokers a ceasefire. Israel enters the ceasefire, takes its desired parts of the agreement, and resumes its assault.
In January 2025, a phased ceasefire took effect. Its first phase held for six weeks. Hamas released thirty-three Israeli captives, Israel freed some 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, and aid entered Gaza, though never at the levels required by the deal. The part of the ceasefire that mattered lay in the second phase: full withdrawal and a permanent end to the war. Israel took what the first phase delivered and refused to open the second.
When the six weeks ran out, mediators proposed a bridge: Hamas would release the Israeli-American captive Edan Alexander and the remains of four dual nationals to buy time for phase-two talks. Hamas accepted on March 14. Israel dismissed the offer and on March 18, with backing from the United States, resumed the war it had refused to end, killing more than 400 people in a single night.
The genocide continued over the next four months. Israel’s bombardment killed more than 8,000 Palestinians, and in July the pattern ran again. Talks in Doha collapsed over the question that decided all the others: whether Israel could resume the war when the sixty-day truce expired. The United States withdrew its team, blaming Hamas for showing “a lack of desire to reach a ceasefire.” Within weeks, Israel’s cabinet approved the plan to conquer Gaza City.
In August, Egypt and Qatar brought back substantially the same sixty-day truce, and Hamas accepted it on August 18. It changed nothing: the Gaza City plan was already set, and on August 20, Defense Minister Israel Katz approved Operation Gideon’s Chariots II, the plan to occupy the city and empty it of its people. Netanyahu then declared that talks could resume only on terms he called “acceptable to Israel”—the requirement that Hamas disarm and surrender power all at once.
Refusal would have led to the same place. Had Hamas turned the proposal down, the offensive would have proceeded exactly as it did: the refusal recast as its cause, the plan Israel had already made recast as the Palestinians’ choice.
The United States has stood behind every proposal, as the power that arms Israel and the only one that can make Israeli refusal cost something. It has not. Negotiation binds a state only when refusal is more expensive than agreement, and the United States, which could transmit Palestinian acceptance, will not make Israel pay for ignoring it.
The other powers that might have constrained Israel at the margins have not. Arab mediation, UN resolutions, the ceasefire agreements themselves remain in place, but none carries a cost for Israel. The Arab governments that have normalized relations with Israel have preserved those ties, and no sanction has threatened the material support on which the war depends. Since Israel resumed the war in March, more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed, while every mechanism meant to stop it runs beside the killing: present, intact, consenting.
Acceptance of a ceasefire changes nothing, and refusal would change nothing, because no Palestinian answer can alter an outcome Israel is free to impose. Through every round, the United States has carried the proposals and withheld the one thing that might have moved Israel: a cost. As the killing has gone on, the same diplomacy that has brokered the talks and the same press that has reported them have converted the failure of negotiations—whatever answer the Palestinians have given—into proof of Palestinian guilt. What Israel has imposed by force has entered the record as a choice the Palestinians have made.
A note from July 2026.
When I wrote this essay in August 2025, the war it described had no visible end; two months later, an end of a kind was announced. That October, a ceasefire took effect under a plan bearing Donald Trump’s name, and its first phase delivered to Israel, at once, what Israel had declared itself to be fighting for: Hamas released the twenty living Israeli captives. In exchange, Israel freed some 1,950 Palestinian prisoners.
What followed had happened before. The later phases turned on a single demand, that Hamas disarm, a condition that was never part of the signed agreement. Israel and the American-led Board of Peace raised it, after the fact, into the precondition for every part of the agreement: for aid, for reconstruction, for the ceasefire itself. Hamas reiterated what it had declared before the ceasefire was ever signed: that it could not yield its right to armed resistance short of “an independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state.” To disarm was to stand defenseless under occupation.
On July 6, 2026, Hamas dissolved its government and offered to hand civil authority to the committee the Board of Peace had created—the body Israel had barred from entering Gaza—removing the pretext that Hamas’s own rule stood in the way. Israel kept the committee out and demanded, once again, that Hamas disarm.
No agreement has ever bound Israel, and this one binds it no more than the rest. The agreement required Israel to withdraw from Gaza in stages; instead, it seized more land, and now holds nearly 70 percent of the Gaza Strip. It required the full entry of aid; Israel holds it to a fraction. In the first nine months of this ceasefire, Israel has killed more than 1,140 Palestinians.
Israel signed the ceasefire and goes on as before, seizing more Palestinian land, starving the living, killing at will, doing in the name of peace what it has always done in the name of war.
Hope is eternal
What stood out to me most is the pattern the article traces: ceasefires are presented as opportunities for peace, yet the unresolved question of what happens after the first phase keeps becoming the point of collapse. The timeline from May 2024 to the January 2025 ceasefire and the later talks makes that pattern especially striking.