More than a month after the Washington-brokered Gaza ceasefire was signed on Oct. 9, U.S. corporate media has virtually ended their coverage of the ongoing misery and death among the territory’s more than 2 million Palestinian residents. Living conditions in Gaza remain desperate due to widespread destruction of homes and infrastructure, mass displacement, the collapse of the healthcare system and severe food shortages caused by Israel’s ongoing restrictions on the delivery of humanitarian aid.
On Nov. 17, the United Nations Security Council voted to support a still vague U.S. plan to create and deploy an international stabilization force to Gaza. This, as Palestinian civilians in Gaza are still being killed and injured by Israeli forces almost on a daily basis, with over 260 deaths reported since the ceasefire went into effect. The overall death toll of Palestinians in Gaza since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023 is more than 69,000, with many missing and presumed dead buried under tons of rubble.
Meanwhile, a surge of Israeli settler and army violence targeting Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has resulted in over 1,000 deaths since October 2023, coinciding with escalating government property seizures, home demolitions and the forcible displacement of thousands of West Bank residents. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Jennifer Loewenstein, former associate director of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who assesses the dire situation for Palestinians in post-ceasefire Gaza.
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: There was a U.S.-backed peace plan, the 20-point Trump plan that was agreed upon Oct. 9-10 by a good number of parties, including many of the Arab states. This peace plan, in my view, is nothing other than a surrender document for the Gazans because it doesn’t end the occupation. It doesn’t give Palestinians the right of self-determination or the right of self-governance within the Gaza Strip. It even imposes a “Board of Peace.” You got to love that name, a Board of Peace onto the Gaza Strip that’s supposed to oversee the future. And today was important because at the United Nations there was a vote on whether or not the second phase of this ceasefire would go forward. The second phase envisions am International Stabilization Force in Gaza that will coordinate with the Israeli army. In the document itself, the Palestinian Authority is supposed to ultimately control the population of Gaza.
Israel has rejected that outright. In fact, (Minister of National Security) Itamar Ben-Gvir has recently suggested that Mahmoud Abbas, the current head of the Palestinian Authority, be jailed or killed. This document that was voted on today also for the International Stabilization Force, that is, it also speaks of a Palestinian state. And over the weekend, Netanyahu and his cronies made it very clear that they don’t care whether this document says that there should be a credible path to a Palestinian state or not, because there will never be a Palestinian state and that they are there to see that that remains a fact. The International Stabilization Force is also supposed to oversee the disarmament of Hamas. That would be very interesting if it ever came to pass, because it won’t. Hamas is not going to disarm, certainly not voluntarily. The point is, although Russia and China abstained from this vote, it did pass.
So regardless of all the different details of this stabilization force that have been written out and described and detailed, it’s very likely never going to happen because Israel opposes it. Hamas opposes it. And there are no states to date offering to send their soldiers, their own military personnel into the Gaza Strip to face off with the Palestinians and the Israelis. Now, the Palestinians rejected this for very good reason, because they don’t want a foreign occupier to stay in the Gaza Strip. They don’t want the Israelis and they don’t want the Indonesians or the Malaysians or anybody else who passed this agreement.
SCOTT HARRIS: Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s long-term invasion and slaughter of Palestinian civilians, there’s been a critical humanitarian crisis there, not least of which is the shortage of food that has been deliberate in terms of the blockade of humanitarian aid and food coming into Gaza. What’s happened since the signing of the ceasefire on Oct. 9 in terms of food distribution as well as medical supplies and equipment?
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