There has never been a truce in Gaza. Despite the ceasefire that came into force on October 10, Israel has never stopped killing. The drones continued to buzz, the bombs never fell silent, the extermination did not stop: it simply changed pace, became intermittent, less visible in the eyes of the world distracted by Trump’s farce announcements.

The Lebanese strategy

Israel is using the same strategy tested in Lebanon: the “cease” is for the others, while the IDF keeps the “fire”. From the date of the agreement, in just 18 days the Zionist army struck at least 125 times in the Strip, killing more than 100 people and wounding five times as many. The word “truce” is only a semantic weapon, an illusion to anesthetize consciences, while on the ground death continues to claim defenseless civilians.

On the other hand, no one could expect a government like Benjamin Netanyahu’s to actually respect the agreement. The new pretext for returning to bombing was the alleged violations in the return of the bodies of Israeli hostages. But in Gaza 95% of the buildings have been pulverized and it will take up to 15 years to remove all the rubble (about 61 million tons). It is therefore entirely plausible that many bodies can no longer be found, considering, furthermore, that more than seventy thousand bombs were dropped on the Strip, the equivalent of six atomic explosions like the one in Hiroshima; looking for someone’s remains in such a landscape means digging into nothingness. But Israel needs a justification, even the flimsiest, to continue to strike.

In recent days the Times of Israel – the official gazette of the Netanyahu government – revealed that intelligence has provided mediators from Egypt, Qatar and Türkiye with the precise coordinates of the places where it believes the hostages are buried. If he really had this information, why then did he raze those same areas to the ground, risking killing his fellow citizens? Wasn’t that a liberation operation in Gaza? The truth is that Israel will use every possible pretext to “finish the job”. Netanyahu himself said this, without mincing words, a few days before the truce, in front of the semi-deserted audience of the United Nations. And by “work” he means the ethnic cleansing of the Gazan people.

It’s not a threat, but a program. Avner Avraham, former Mossad agent, explained it with disturbing clarity in an interview given on October 3 to journalist Israel Ellis: “At the end of the day, after we have brought back all the hostages, there will be an agreement. But there is something else in this agreement: there is no future for Gaza, it will pay forever for October 7.” Then he added a prediction or, better, a confession: “Suddenly someone will launch missiles towards Israel. Maybe we will launch them ourselves from within, so we can say: ‘Oh, it’s raining missiles from Gaza. So now we can respond’. And we will cancel it.”

A fake truce

Here it is, the plan: a series of (unrealizable) requests or (artfully constructed) excuses to complete the destruction of the Strip, emptying it of its people. Don’t fool yourselves: no announcement of peace, no reconstruction project signed by Donald Trump, the king of rubbish, will be able to change the ending of this tragedy. The future of Gaza has already been written for some time by the United States and Israel, but the world will be informed little by little, to make it more digestible for public opinion. That future does not include the Palestinians: what happened last night reminds us of this, when yet another indiscriminate bombing caused at least 90 deaths. Twenty-four were children, but for US Vice President JD Vance they are just “skirmishes”. Meanwhile, in the major Western newspapers, there are still those who have the courage to call it a “truce”.