Israel has now violated the so-called ceasefire 47 times since it supposedly began in early October, according to Gaza’s media office. Those violations have killed 38 Palestinians and injured another 143 — mostly civilians. That’s not a “truce.” It’s a continuation of the same campaign of violence, just in slower motion and under a different name.
The latest violation came Friday, when Israeli forces opened fire on a bus in Gaza City, killing eleven members of a single family — seven children, three women, and a man — for crossing what the IDF calls the “yellow line.” The “line,” as it turns out, doesn’t exist. It’s an imaginary boundary, with no physical markers, that supposedly separates areas under Israeli control. In other words, these civilians were murdered for crossing an invisible line in their own city.
If this is what Israel calls a ceasefire, then the word has lost all meaning. A truce, in international law and in every modern conflict, means an end to hostilities — a suspension of violence. Violating that agreement 47 times, with lethal force against civilians, turns the ceasefire into a propaganda tool rather than a peace mechanism.
And yet Israel insists it is Hamas that is breaking the truce — not by firing rockets or attacking Israeli forces, but by failing to deliver the bodies of dead hostages quickly enough. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has even ordered the continued closure of the Rafah crossing — Gaza’s only real entry point for aid — until Hamas returns every body of every deceased hostage.
Of course, the bodies of the dead should be returned, although, considering Israel’s nonstop bombardment of Gaza for two years, which turned the whole place into a wasteland, it seems likely that some of the dead are not, how to say this, not bodies anymore.
Of course, neither are the thousands of Gazans who are under the 60 million tons of rubble produced by Israeli bombs. Equating living hostages to the dead, and then using the dead as an excuse to create more dead is, to my way of thinking, obscene.
In virtually every other modern conflict — from the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to Russia’s in Ukraine — the retrieval of bodies, though emotionally charged, is treated as a humanitarian issue, not a precondition for food and medicine relief. It’s handled through intermediaries like the Red Cross. Israel’s choice to weaponize the dead, to hold food and medicine hostage until corpses are returned, is a moral distortion of staggering proportions.
Meanwhile, the numbers mount. Gaza’s health ministry reports a death toll exceeding 68,000, with an estimated 10,000 more bodies still buried under the 60 million tons of rubble. The destruction is so vast that Turkey has sent rescue teams to detect where these mass “graves” are. And while these recovery efforts continue, Israel continues to shoot civilians for “crossing” imaginary lines, while demanding the return of its own dead as proof of Hamas’s good faith.
A truce cannot coexist with continuous killing. A ceasefire cannot mean “pause between massacres.” And the moral inversion at the heart of Israel’s policy — that the bodies of Israel’s dead matter more than the lives of Palestinian civilians — exposes what this war, and the ones before it, have always been about: domination, not defense.
Until the international community is willing to call this what it is — not a fragile peace but a continued assault under the banner of a ceasefire — Israel will keep killing, and calling it restraint. And Trump will strut around proclaiming himself a peacemaker not the facilitator of genocide that he is.
