By Duha Almusaddar, Programme Manager at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Palestine and Jordan Office.
While presented as a ceasefire, the prisoner exchange agreement between Israel and Hamas announced on 15 January is in fact far from it. From the beginning, its ambiguous nature, not to mention ongoing incursions, the military siege, and restrictions on aid all serve to underline this fact. Repeated delays to the ongoing negotiation process, not to mention the resumption of open hostilities from the Israeli side this week, suggest that it was ultimately merely a pause in the fighting before another round of expulsions resumes.
Yet even if this fragile agreement were to eventually lead to an actual ceasefire, Gazans know from experience that such deals are always short-lived. That fragility is further exacerbated this time around by the unprecedented destruction across the Gaza Strip, and the bitter reality that a just political solution to ensure such destruction never happens again is nowhere in sight.
With the announcement of the first stage of the deal, Gazans had hoped for space to take a breath, grieve, and collect themselves. The bombing may have stopped, but now they are left to endure horrific conditions without shelter or any meaningful infrastructure. To make matters worse, only days after the deal was announced, a newly re-elected President Trump publicly announced his intention to ethnically cleanse them from their homeland.
Left in the Ruins
But back to the “ceasefire” itself, which, as can be seen in the agreement with Lebanon, Israel can abrogate at any moment. The same is true in the occupied West Bank, where Israel continues to target refugee camp infrastructure, displace residents, arbitrarily arrest civilians, tolerate (if not encourage) settler violence, and prepare the ground for open annexation, despite yet another recent UN resolution stating Israel must end all its unlawful actions in the Occupied Territories and comply with international law.
What does all this mean for the Gaza Strip? Rather than a ceasefire, the current agreement can be read as the beginning of a shift towards targeted ethnic cleansing, rather than open warfare. Barring that, Israel seems to be wagering that left to their own devices among the rubble, many Gazans will simply choose to leave on their own accord sooner or later. To ensure this happens, Israel and its closest ally, the United States, are doing their best to ensure that conditions remain unbearable by criminalizing UNRWA operations in Palestine, cutting funds to USAID, and denying the entry of urgently needed aid and shelter along with the necessary equipment to remove the rubble and begin rebuilding.
The latest report by the UN Secretary General estimates the cost of recovery for the Gaza Strip at 53 billion US dollars, of which 20 billion is needed for the immediate term alone. It is still unclear from whom and how such a sum could be collected.
According to the report, “Over 60 per cent of homes and 65 per cent of roads have been destroyed. In addition, 88 per cent of schools in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. Some 20 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were not functioning before the ceasefire came into effect.” Yet the unprecedented destruction caused by 15 months of warfare in the Gaza Strip left over 50 million tons of debris and a swathe of devastating environmental, physical, and psychological effects that are more difficult to “reconstruct”.
Previous reconstruction efforts in Gaza, all of which were incomparable to the current level of need, were slow, inefficient, and many of the pledged funds never arrived. These operations also relied on materials supplied by the Israeli-controlled Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism, further complicating and prolonging the process. This same level of control is now applied to the aid currently coming into Gaza, particularly since the current agreement came into effect, at a time when Gazans’ needs are particularly urgent given the extent of the destruction
Next Step: Ethnic Cleansing?
When the agreement was first announced, it was stated the reconstruction of Gaza would be agreed upon in subsequent rounds of negotiations. Yet President Trump — surely no friend of the Palestinian people — decided to create facts on the ground instead. Acknowledging, in a sense, the deplorable living conditions in Gaza in a way many politicians have not, he proposed his own, very Trumpian solution to relieve Gazans from these conditions: not expediting reconstruction, recognizing a Palestinian State, allowing aid and experts in, collecting urgent funds, or creating a transparent and efficient reconstruction mechanism, but rather forcible population transfer — a universally acknowledged crime against humanity.
While many were shocked by Trump’s statements, ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip is not a new proposal, but has in fact been in the making for decades — and always met with determined Palestinian resistance. Attempts at ethnic cleansing in Gaza began with the Israeli occupation in 1967, followed by the military siege and incursions that have made life in Gaza so unbearable since 2007. Since the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, calls to physically transfer Gaza’s population grew louder and clearer across Israeli society.
The conditions to implement such a transfer were put in place by making life in the Strip increasingly unbearable. In fact, the White House had already submitted a funding request to support Gazans fleeing into other neighbouring countries to Congress on 20 October 2023, long before Trump took office.
These plans did not materialize in a vacuum. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 published a report in March 2024, six months after Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza, concluding that Israeli forces were committing genocide. The current genocide was framed as the latest development in a long-standing, decades-old “settler-colonial process of erasure”.
The report refers to historical examples of Native Americans in the US or the Herero in Namibia, where settlers sought to seize control over resources and territory while pushing the indigenous population off the land or exterminating them entirely. The practices to achieve this include: forcible transfer and ethnic cleansing, movement restrictions, and mass killings via starvation and other methods. The report then reflects on this process in Palestine, starting with calls to remove all Arabs in Palestine, then with ethnic cleansing in 1948, the occupation in 1967, the segregation of Palestinians, and the siege on Gaza.
Unfortunately, the response to Trump’s recent attempt to unlawfully transfer Palestinians did not go beyond toothless denunciations. Israel has already officially banned UNRWA operations and the US has ceased USAID funding, both of which will have negative impacts on the humanitarian operations that Gazans urgently need. UNRWA has been the backbone for aid delivery and key services such as health and education, especially in the Gaza Strip, whose population is overwhelmingly refugees. Even if military operations were to slow down (a true ceasefire is highly unlikely), all of the elements needed for human survival will continue to be eliminated, forcing more and more Gazans to decide between a slow, painful death at home or a new existence elsewhere, all while the world looks on.
Palestinians inspect the destruction after an Israeli strike on the building in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City, 19 March 2025. Photo: IMAGO / APAimages
Truth and Reconciliation from the River to the Sea
The existential threats facing Palestinians across the Occupied Territories require a unified Palestinian leadership that rises above partisan squabbles. The political division between Fatah and Hamas for nearly two decades, combined with the fragmentation caused by the occupation between Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and those living inside Israel itself have made it difficult to create an alternative unified Palestinian leadership, and has led to a situation which Israel can easily exploit. As our civilization teeters on the abyss, such political fragmentation and division can no longer continue. A clear strategy and collective efforts towards liberation are vital to advancing and securing our right to live in our native homeland safely and freely.
For decades now, the international community has failed Palestinians while granting Israel impunity. What has happened in Gaza must mark a shift: the institutions of the “rules-based international order” cannot allow such grave crimes to go unpunished. It would set a terrible precedent from which their reputations may never recover. Israel’s escalating offensive in the West Bank points to what the future will hold if the international community fails to act decisively. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese already warned in October 2024 that Israel violence against the Palestinians that is “causing irreparable prejudice to the very existence of the Palestinian people in Palestine” and that member states must immediately intervene “to prevent new atrocities that will further scar human history”.
Palestine and the world stand at a critical juncture. It will take years, if not decades for the Gaza Strip and its people to recover from the devastation of the last year-and-a-half, but steps can be taken now to ensure that this vicious cycle comes to an end. Support for UNRWA must continue: Gazans must be provided with urgently needed shelter and medicine. But after that, Palestinians deserve universal recognition of their right to self-determination. This means, first of all, recognizing the Palestinian state and establishing accountability mechanisms based on transitional and restorative justice as implemented in post-Apartheid South Africa.
No one can change what has happened during decades of occupation and ethnic cleansing. But we have the power to change what happens in the years to come.