Abdel Kareem Hana/AP Photo
Palestinians walk through the destruction in the wake of an Israeli air and ground offensive in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, January 7, 2025.
Well, at least the cease-fire came while there are some structures still standing in Gaza.
As for the war itself, the official death toll of Palestinians killed in the war—not counting those who starved or froze or otherwise died due to Israel’s 15-month war to destroy Gaza but not from military action per se—now comes to just over 46,000. Coincidentally, a report that appeared last week in The Lancet by some British epidemiologists concluded that the Palestinian authorities’ official death tally through last June undercounted Palestinian war-caused deaths by 41 percent. If the undercount has remained at that level, that means the actual death toll is more like 65,000. The Lancet also calculated that 59 percent of the deaths have been those of women, children, and the elderly.
The initial phase of the cease-fire is supposed to begin on Sunday, during which Hamas will release its first tranche of hostages and Israel its first tranche of war prisoners. (Presumably, the cease-fire is to last for at least 42 days.) Israel will also begin a withdrawal to Gaza’s Eastern areas, the first significant amounts of medical and food shipments will be permitted into Gaza, and Palestinians will be free to return to their residences, which only now, courtesy of some fires on a distant hemisphere, resemble most residences in the Pacific Palisades. Rebuilding the Palisades will be long and arduous; rebuilding Gaza looks, for all intents and purposes, to be impossible—which was the clear intent of the Netanyahu government.
Whether or not this phase of the conflict is now over, it’s been clear for some time that Hamas’s murder raid of October 7, 2023, was both strategically imbecilic and morally outrageous, enabling the Israeli government to launch a war that was also strategically imbecilic and morally outrageous—and quantitatively, a lot more deadly. October 7th reduced the share of Israelis committed to a two-state solution in the foreseeable future from a minority status to a microscopic one, and as Israel is the region’s hegemonic power, that meant there’d be no effective internal resistance to the Israeli right’s drive to extend their state from the river to the sea.
The morally outrageous quality of Israel’s response strategically alienated its remaining allies, save only the Christian evangelicals who believe that Jesus’s Second Coming depends on Israel’s formal expansion to the Jordan River (a belief not notably shared among Israelis, I hasten to point out), the MAGA world those evangelicals inhabit, and old-time Zionists who don’t understand that the Israel founded by socialists and kibbutzniks has given way to an Israel of ethnic-cleansing authoritarian nationalists and ultra-Orthodox anti-Enlightenment cults. Bernie Sanders is an old-time Zionist who once worked on a kibbutz, but he understands what Israel has become and has been calling for a cessation of U.S. arms to Israel throughout this long and bloody war. Joe Biden is an old-time Zionist who never quite understood that the Israel he admired had given way to something that would have appalled the nation’s social democratic founders, for which reason he never put the force of stopping the flow of arms behind his efforts to get a cease-fire. The consequences of that failure can be seen in Gaza’s sea of rubble and heaps of corpses. Here at home, it was also one of the many factors behind Kamala Harris’s failure to carry Michigan last November, as well as the steep falloff in youth voting for Democrats in that election (though I very much doubt it was the foremost factor).
Hamas clearly didn’t destroy Israel, but it damn near destroyed the Israeli left. It transformed Israel’s potential Palestinian-eliminating energy into an all-too-kinetic war, which also enabled the previously embattled Netanyahu to exploit his newfound cred as a war leader to extend his term in office by also taking on Hezbollah and the Houthis, and by extension, their sponsor, Iran. That, in turn, endeared him to such anti-Iran Arab leaders as the Saudis, possibly creating a basis for a Middle East dominated by Israel and the Sunni oil states, who’ve never really concerned themselves with the plight of the Palestinians.
As to the cease-fire itself: We’ll never know for certain just how much Biden’s continuing support for arming Israel contributed to the 15-month duration of its onslaught, but we can be quite sure that it failed to deter Bibi from rolling the bloodbath on. We’ll know very soon if the cease-fire will actually start on Sunday, or if it will be marked by continued Israeli attacks on Gaza, just as Israel’s cease-fire with Hezbollah featured continued Israeli attacks on suspected Hezbollah hideouts in Lebanon for several weeks after the date the attacks were supposed to cease. And we know from the evidence of our eyes, and others’ eyes, that the reality on the ground in Gaza matches that described 2,000 years ago when the Roman historian Tacitus wrote of the aftermath of one of the Empire’s wars: “They make a desert and call it peace.”
