By Ellen Isaacs
As Israeli forces withdrew back from central Gaza, while continuing to occupy 53% of the territory, they gleefully torched homes and the last remaining sanitation plant in Gaza City. There will now be no source of potable water for Gazans attempting to return to their destroyed homes. 1 Gazans will still have to live in tents as 90% of structures are leveled. The sick and injured will not be able to receive anything approaching adequate health care in the destroyed and unsupplied hospitals. Food, water and medicine will long be difficult to access. Indeed, nearly all surviving Gazans are debilitated, ill and/or psychologically devastated, and nothing approaching their need for rehabilitation is available.
Why is this respite even happening now? It’s hard to be sure, but it likely has to do with Netanyahu bombing Qatar, which is so dear to Trump. Not only did Qatar give him his big beautiful (old) new plane, but they just agreed to build a new Trump golf course there and to $243.5 billion in deals.2 Qatar is also the site of the headquarters of US Central Command, which directs military operations across 21 countries, and recently agreed to build a training facility in Idaho for their pilots.3 All this on top of the growing worldwide hatred of Israel, bringing antagonism to the US along with it, was enough for Trump to order Netanyahu to stop his atrocities. Not give up ruling Palestine, just cool it.
Even as Hamas returned all the living hostages and bodies of many of the deceased, Israel began to release only 2000 of the 11,000 prisoners it holds, most without charges. Most of those prisoners have been severely mistreated, and many can expect to be soon re-arrested, as during the previous releases. As Israelis wildly celebrate the return of their captives, Palestinians have been forbidden to celebrate at all or face arrest. This alone makes it clear that there is no liberation involved in this settlement.
What is definite is that the occupation and oppression of Palestinians will not end. The wall around the West Bank and Gaza will remain. The occupation by Israeli soldiers, the check points, the military court system, the surveillance will remain throughout Palestine. All that may be new is that imperialists like the US and their wealthy autocratic allies in the Middle East – Qatar, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia – will have more direct access to Gaza in order to exploit its land and location. The fact remains that near 80% of the world’s fossil fuel resources they value so much are in the Middle East and cannot be ceded. There is no indication that Israel has in any way changed its goal of taking over all of Palestine and getting rid of Palestinians by death or displacement (see https://multiracialunity.org/2023/12/07/ethnic-cleansing-was-always-the-zionist-plan/).
We do not know if Hamas plans to disarm as Israel demands, but we doubt it. Thus Israel may seize upon this or many other issues to restart its war of annihilation. Even if hostilities do not begin again, we do not know if the imperialist-run Board of Peace will allow any Palestinians, including the Palestinian Authority (PA), to play any role in Gaza. But neither the PA nor Hamas has anything to offer Palestinian workers in any case. They both have exploited and abused Palestinian workers to enrich themselves and ensconce themselves in power without regard to the wellbeing of their citizenry. We do not know if the capitalist powers of the world will continue to pay lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state, but we do know that such an entity is impossible in an occupied, disempowered, scattered and impoverished land. In fact, this mythological concept has simply served as pretense of righteousness for those very governments that continued to arm Israel and tolerate genocide.
There is no hope for the workers of Palestine – or for the workers of Sudan, Congo, El Salvador, even Israel and the US, all the world – unless a class conscious, anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist movement can be born out of the ashes. The world is moving closer to much larger and more devastating war between the competing capitalists of the US and China and their allies. The world is experiencing accelerating climate change that threatens all of our existence. Fascism is rapidly advancing even in the most liberal “democracies” like the US and Britain as capitalists’ profits and power fade. Revolutionary system change may not be on the near horizon, but it is critical. Let us start planning to get rid of capitalism and imperialism now, everywhere. Let us start envisioning a world run by and for workers.
- https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-idf-soldiers-set-fire-food-homes-sewage-treatment-plan-after-ceasefire-announced
- https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-secures-historic-1-2-trillion-economic-commitment-in-qatar/
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-qatar-air-force-facility-us-base-idaho/
Ellen Isaacs is a physician, anti-racist and anti-capitalist activist and co-editor of multiracialunity.org.
14 October 2025
Source: countercurrents.org