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By Rima Najjar

Author’s Note

Although abiding by the October 2025 Trump-brokered ceasefire — a deal that claims to stabilize but instead entrenches asymmetry — Palestinians are actively resisting this containment. Through legal filings, civil documentation, mutual aid, and discursive reframing, they refuse to let transitional committees and humanitarian optics overwrite the demand for sovereignty, return, and accountability.

This acceptance of a ceasefire is not a surrender of arms, nor a dissolution of resistance. The agreement pauses fire and enables prisoner exchanges and humanitarian access, but it explicitly defers Israel’s demand for disarmament. In practice, it underscores the distinction between tactical compliance under pressure and existential refusal of erasure.

In this essay, I trace the evolution of demands and counterdemands after Oct 7 and the evolution of armed resistance — from stone-throwing youth in the First Intifada to drone-led breaches in 2023 — alongside Israel’s escalating countermeasures: assassinations, sieges, surveillance, and legal erasure. Each phase reveals not only tactical shifts, but the persistence of asymmetry and the recalibration of refusal, shedding light on what is likely to come next.

Note: In this essay, references to “Hamas” should be understood as shorthand for Hamas and allied Palestinian resistance factions, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees, and others operating within the Joint Operations Room.

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1. Reckoning Without Resolution

The Trump-brokered ceasefire that took effect on October 12, 2025 is structurally fragile. It rests on the premise that Israel can retain strategic control while outsourcing civil governance to vetted intermediaries. But can it? I would argue not. It assumes Palestinian resistance can be pacified through aid and administrative reshuffling. It won’t. And it assumes — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that Israel can hold a ceasefire at all.

That premise collapses under scrutiny. Israel is currently rearresting freed Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank even as it negotiates exchange. It has done so before — during the Shalit exchange, the Oslo-era releases, and countless ceasefire arrangements. This tactic isn’t exceptional; it’s strategic. Israel uses rearrests as leverage, punishment, and disruption.

In the past year alone, Israel violated the November 2024 Lebanon ceasefire over 500 times, launched airstrikes within 24 hours of the October 2025 Gaza agreement, and sabotaged prisoner exchanges through preemptive arrests. For Israel, ceasefires function less as commitments than as diplomatic cover for continued operations.

The ceasefire also assumes that the destruction of Gaza and the slaughter of its population will serve as a deterrent. It won’t. Deterrence presumes survival is the goal. But Palestinian resistance is rooted not in fear, but in dispossession, memory, and refusal. The logic collapses when a besieged people have already endured decades of displacement and erasure — when atrocity becomes not a warning, but a reckoning. Resistance isn’t reducible to governance gaps. It endures because containment denies recognition, accountability, and return.

And beneath it all lies a final, unspoken assumption: that Israel can still project the image of invincibility. But that image has already fractured — on the battlefield, in the media, and in the moral imagination of a watching world. What remains is not deterrence, but desperation masquerading as dominance.

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So, where is this ceasefire heading?

• Toward asymmetrical governance: Gaza administered by international actors, but under Israeli military shadow — producing friction, fragmentation, and renewed resistance.
• Toward legal confrontation: ICC cases testing the limits of state impunity — either restoring credibility to international law or exposing its complicity.
• Toward discursive rupture: Resistance language breaking into the mainstream — Palestinian demands for dignity, return, and accountability reframed as legitimate claims.
• Toward regional recalibration: Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey asserting mediation, the U.S. clinging to centrality, Arab publics pressing harder, regional actors less deferential.
• Toward global mobilization: Activist networks surging across continents — boycotts, divestments, encampments, and mass demonstrations eroding Israel’s moral exceptionalism and accelerating its isolation.

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The ceasefire may hold temporarily, but the underlying asymmetries remain. What has changed is their visibility, the legal and discursive tools available to contest them, and the refusal — by Palestinians and global publics alike — to accept managed containment as peace.

Palestinian history teaches us that when Israel preserves its power through deferral and fragmentation, resistance recalibrates — as it has. From the First Intifada’s stones to the drone-led breaches of 2023, Palestinians have adapted their tactics in response to the evolving machinery of occupation. The brutal reality is that nonviolent appeals alone yield no structural change. International forums delay, humanitarian frameworks depoliticize, and ceasefires collapse under the weight of Israeli impunity.

The shift from mass marches to legal filings, from symbolic protest to infrastructural sabotage, reflects a refusal to be contained by frameworks that treat recognition as negotiable and justice as deferrable. It is also a response to the collapse of Israel’s deterrence doctrine. The myth of invincibility — once central to its strategic posture — has unraveled. What remains is not deterrence, but a cycle of escalation that exposes the limits of force and the futility of erasure.

What brings us to this moment is not just breach, but clarity: that resistance must be plural, strategic, and unrelenting. That ceasefire without justice is not peace — it is postponement. And that every recalibration is a reminder: the demand for return, dignity, and accountability will not be pacified. It will be rearticulated, reimagined, and reasserted — until the scaffolds of impunity collapse.

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2. From Stones to Drones

If the ceasefire reveals the fragility of Israel’s deterrence, the trajectory of Palestinian resistance reveals its persistence. Resistance has never been static; it has shifted forms in response to both repression and possibility, each phase marked by tactical recalibration and Israeli countermeasure. What endures is not a single method, but a continuum — stones, rockets, tunnels, drones — each iteration exposing the limits of domination and the futility of erasure.

During the First Intifada (1987–1993), grassroots organizers in Gaza and the West Bank — primarily under the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising — mobilized civilians to boycott Israeli goods, refuse tax payments, and stage mass demonstrations. Young Palestinians hurled stones at soldiers and tanks. These acts of defiance pressured Israeli authorities and drew global attention, culminating in the 1993 Oslo Accords. While Israel retained military control, Palestinians gained limited self-governance through the newly formed Palestinian Authority.

In the Second Intifada (2000–2005), armed factions such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades escalated resistance through suicide bombings, ambushes, and sniper attacks. Israel responded with Operation Defensive Shield, reoccupied major West Bank cities, and constructed the separation wall. It assassinated key Palestinian leaders, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. Palestinians asserted their refusal to accept occupation, while Israel fortified borders and fragmented Palestinian political unity.

After Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas consolidated control and shifted tactics toward rocket warfare. Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched thousands of rockets into southern Israel, prompting repeated Israeli military operations — Cast Lead (2008–09), Pillar of Defense (2012), and Protective Edge (2014). Israel deployed airstrikes, ground invasions, and naval blockades, killing thousands and destroying infrastructure. Palestinian factions built underground tunnels for smuggling and surprise attacks. Despite heavy losses, they maintained operational capacity and international visibility. Simultaneously, civil society groups organized nonviolent campaigns — like the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and the Great March of Return (2018) — which Israel countered with sniper fire and legal restrictions.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and allied Palestinian resistance factions launched a coordinated assault on southern Israel, targeting military bases, surveillance systems, and nearby settlements. Fighters used drones to disable towers, powered paragliders to breach airspace, and sent ground units to storm fortified positions. In the same area, the Nova music festival — held near Kibbutz Re’im, adjacent to several military installations — was caught both in the assault and in Israeli fire enacted under the Hannibal doctrine, a protocol invoked to prevent abductions even at the risk of killing Israeli civilians and soldiers. Israel responded with overwhelming force.

Approximately 1,200 people were killed inside Israel and more than 200 taken hostage by Hamas and allied factions. While the overall toll is widely cited, the precise breakdown remains unclear: independent tallies suggest roughly 815 civilians (including 36 children and 79 foreign nationals) and about 379 members of Israeli security forces, but attribution of responsibility for each death — whether caused by Palestinian fighters, Israeli crossfire under the Hannibal doctrine, or other circumstances — has not been independently verified.

For Palestinians, the breach shattered the illusion of Israeli invincibility and re-centered Gaza in global discourse. It demonstrated that even under siege, Palestinian factions could disrupt one of the most technologically fortified borders in the world. The operation forced international observers to confront the asymmetry of power and the persistence of Palestinian resistance.

Israel responded with overwhelming force. The Air Force bombed residential neighborhoods, refugee camps, and what it described as Hamas command centers — claims that were later discredited, as no such military infrastructure was found. The IDF invaded northern Gaza and imposed a full siege — cutting off electricity, fuel, food, and water. Cyber units disrupted communications, while Shin Bet and Mossad coordinated assassinations of Hamas leaders. These actions aimed to dismantle Hamas’s military capacity and restore deterrence.

Israel’s response deepened the humanitarian catastrophe and intensified global scrutiny of U.S.-backed impunity. Images of mass displacement and destroyed hospitals fueled international protests and legal challenges. While Israel achieved short-term tactical gains, it faced mounting reputational costs and renewed calls for accountability.

Meanwhile, Palestinian civil society responded with mass funerals, war crimes documentation, and digital campaigns that reframed the narrative. Artists, journalists, and legal advocates amplified testimonies and challenged the framing of the conflict as symmetrical. The October 7 breach marked not just a military rupture but a discursive one — where the limits of Israeli impunity and the resilience of Palestinian resistance collided on a global stage.

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3. Parallel Demands and Reversals (Oct 7, 2023–Oct 12, 2025)

If the evolution of Palestinian resistance — from stones to drones — signaled the collapse of Israel’s deterrence, then in the wake of October 7 the struggle shifted into negotiation rooms, where demands for recognition and return collided with Israeli preconditions and strategic reversals. Even the Palestinian negotiators themselves became targets of assassination attempts, exposing how perilous and fragile the process had become. Each phase unfolded as a duel of assertions: Palestinian calls for liberation met Israeli demands for submission, and every apparent concession dissolved under the weight of reversal.

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Phase 1: Shock and Assertion (Oct–Dec 2023)

Hamas demanded an immediate halt to Israeli military operations, the lifting of the Gaza blockade, and the release of thousands of Palestinian captives. Civil society amplified these demands through legal petitions, war-crimes dossiers, and mass testimony campaigns.

Israel responded with overwhelming force — bombing Gaza, invading northern sectors, and extending operations into Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Its counter-demand was categorical: the unconditional return of Israeli captives and Hamas’s total dismantlement.

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Phase 2: Strategic Entrenchment and Internationalization (Jan–Dec 2024)

Hamas recalibrated, advancing phased negotiation proposals centered on humanitarian corridors and prisoner exchanges. It entered indirect talks mediated by Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey.

Israel entrenched itself in maximalist positions — reoccupying strategic zones, violating ceasefire terms, and enacting laws that criminalized dissent. Cyber operations targeted Palestinian communications, extending the battlefield into the digital sphere.

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Phase 3: Exhaustion and Tactical Concessions (Jan–Oct 2025)

Hamas accepted a U.S.-brokered framework for phased disarmament, international aid oversight, and prisoner exchange. Civil society deepened its role, documenting violations and reframing Palestinian narratives in international forums.

Israel signed the ceasefire but immediately subverted it — rearresting released Palestinian prisoners, resuming airstrikes in Lebanon, and using tactical compliance as cover for strategic reversal.

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4. Legal Terrain: Cracks in the Shield

If the cycle of demands and reversals revealed the fragility of ceasefires, the legal terrain exposes the deeper fault line: enforcement. The Trump-brokered ceasefire was heralded as a stabilizing breakthrough, yet its credibility hinges on a question that shadows every Israeli-Palestinian truce: what does Israeli impunity mean for law itself?

Israel’s long record of violating international law under U.S. protection now faces unprecedented scrutiny. The ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant mark a symbolic rupture, but symbolism alone cannot compel compliance. With no binding enforcement mechanisms, the ceasefire rests on fragile ground, and Israel’s history casts doubt on its intent to honor any terms.

Within 24 hours of the October 2025 ceasefire, Israel resumed airstrikes on Gaza, blocked UNRWA access, and withheld basic services. In the West Bank, Israel is rearresting previously freed Palestinian prisoners, violating the terms of the planned exchange.

These breaches are not anomalies — they are systemic. Israel’s military openly describes ceasefire-period strikes in Lebanon as “operational achievements,” boasting of degrading Hezbollah’s infrastructure during supposed calm. In Gaza, it refuses to commit in writing to non-resumption of hostilities, leaving every truce vulnerable to unilateral escalation.

The legal implications are mounting. Civil society groups, international legal bodies, and regional governments are documenting violations, filing complaints, and demanding accountability. The ICC’s jurisdictional reach is expanding, and calls for sanctions — once dismissed as fringe — are entering mainstream policy debates. The Trump administration’s silence on these violations further exposes the fragility of ceasefire enforcement when impunity is structurally embedded.

This is the terrain of reckoning. Israeli impunity is no longer absolute, and Palestinian resistance is no longer framed as disruption — it is increasingly recognized as demand. The Trump-brokered ceasefire may falter, but the architecture of accountability is being built — clause by clause, testimony by testimony, breach by breach.

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5. Closing: Not Resolution, But Refusal

The cracks in Israel’s legal shield are mirrored by fractures in its discursive one. Every filing, every warrant, every clause is shadowed by a larger contest: over memory, over narrative, over who defines legitimacy. Law alone cannot contain the struggle. What follows is not only a legal battle but a cultural and political rupture — where testimony becomes weapon, narrative becomes terrain, and refusal insists on being heard.

Palestinian refusal is infrastructural, legal, and through discourse — through discourse — in essays, poetry, slogans, oral histories, media, and everyday language that assert identity, memory, and resistance. It lives in the testimonies submitted to the ICC, in the rearrested prisoners whose names reappear on walls and in chants, and in the refusal of families to evacuate homes marked for demolition. It is the insistence that survival is not surrender, and that reconstruction without recognition is another form of erasure.

Hamas and allied factions’ acceptance of the ceasefire is an agreement to pause fire, exchange prisoners, and allow humanitarian access under international pressure. It is not an agreement to surrender arms, dissolve the resistance, or abandon the demand for sovereignty and return. Those issues were explicitly deferred, and Israel’s unmet insistence on disarmament underscores that what was accepted was tactical, while what was refused was existential.

The Trump plan, like Oslo before it, offers managed fragmentation: transitional committees, conditional aid, and strategic ambiguity. But the Palestinian response — across generations and geographies — has made clear that containment will not be mistaken for resolution. The ceasefire may pause the missiles, but it cannot pause memory, nor the demand for return, dignity, and accountability.

This moment carries the weight of accumulated refusal. It is not the end of war, nor the beginning of peace. It is the threshold where impunity is named, resistance is reframed, and the architecture of silence begins to crack. What comes next will not be decided in diplomatic chambers alone, but in the spaces where testimony, law, and memory converge — and where refusal becomes the grammar of justice.

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.

13 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

If we are to speak of a Palestinian victory in Gaza, it is a resounding triumph for the Palestinian people, their indomitable spirit, and their deeply rooted resistance that transcends faction, ideology, and politics.

For decades, the prevailing notion was that the ‘solution’ to the Israeli occupation of Palestine lay in a strictly negotiated process. “Only dialogue can achieve peace” has been the relentlessly peddled mantra in political circles, academic platforms, media forums, and the like.

A colossal industry burgeoned around that idea, expanding dramatically in the lead-up to, and for years after, the signing of the Oslo Accords between Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli government.

The Unmaking of ‘Peace’

The problem was never with the fundamental principle of ‘dialogue,’ ‘peace,’ nor even with that of ‘painful compromises‘ — a notion tirelessly circulated during the ‘peace process’ period between 1993 and the early 2000s.

Instead, the conflict has largely been shaped by how these terms, and an entire scaffolding of similar terminology, were defined and implemented. ‘Peace’ for Israel and the US necessitated a subservient Palestinian leadership, ready to negotiate and operate within confined parameters, and entirely outside the binding parameters of international law.

Similarly, ‘dialogue’ was only permissible if the Palestinian leadership consented to renounce ‘terrorism’ — read: armed resistance — disarm, recognize Israel’s purported right to exist as a Jewish state, and adhere to the prescribed language dictated by Israel and the US.

In fact, only after officially renouncing ‘terrorism’ and accepting a restricted interpretation of specific UN resolutions on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza did Washington agree to ‘dialogue’ with Arafat. Such low-level conversations took place in Tunisia and involved a junior US official — Robert Pelletreau, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.

Not once did Israel consent to ‘dialogue’ with Palestinians without a stringent set of preconditions, driving Arafat to a unilateral series of concessions at the expense of his people. Ultimately, Oslo yielded nothing of intrinsic value for Palestinians, apart from Israel’s mere recognition, not of Palestine or the Palestinian people, but of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which, over time, became a conduit for corruption. The PA’s continued existence is inextricably linked to that of the Israeli occupation itself.

Israel, conversely, operated unchecked, conducting raids on Palestinian towns, executing massacres at will, enforcing a debilitating siege on Gaza, assassinating activists, and imprisoning Palestinians en masse, including women and children. In fact, the post-‘dialogue,’ ‘peace,’ and ‘painful compromises’ era witnessed the largest expansion and effective annexation of Palestinian land since the 1967 Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Gaza as the Anomaly

During this period, there was a widespread consensus that violence, meaning only Palestinian armed resistance in response to unconstrained Israeli violence, was intolerable. The PA’s Mahmoud Abbas dismissed it in 2008 as ‘useless,’ and subsequently, in coordination with the Israeli military, devoted much of the PA’s security apparatus to suppress any form of resistance to Israel, armed or otherwise.

Though Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus, and other regions and refugee camps in the West Bank continued to forge spaces, however constrained, for armed resistance, the concerted efforts of Israel and the PA often crushed or at least substantially reduced these moments.

Gaza, however, consistently stood as the anomaly. The Strip’s armed uprisings have persisted since the early 1950s, with the emergence of the fedayeen movement, followed by a succession of socialist and Islamic resistance groups. The place has always remained unmanageable — by Israel, and later by the PA. When Abbas loyalists were defeated following brief but tragic violent clashes between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza in 2007, the small territory became an undisputed center of armed resistance.

This event occurred two years after the Israeli army’s redeployment out of Palestinian population centers in the Strip (2005), into the so-called military buffer zones, established on areas that were historically part of Gaza’s territory. It was the start of today’s hermetic siege on Gaza. 

In 2006, Hamas secured a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council, an unexpected turn of events that infuriated Washington, Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and other Western and Arab allies.

The fear was that without Israel’s PA allies maintaining control over the resistance inside Gaza and the West Bank, the occupied territories would inevitably result in a widespread anti-occupation revolt.

Consequently, Israel intensified its suffocating siege on the Strip, which refused to capitulate despite the horrific humanitarian crisis resulting from the blockade. Thus, starting in 2008, Israel adopted a new strategy: treating the Gaza resistance as an actual military force, thereby launching major wars that resulted in the killing and wounding of tens of thousands of people, predominantly civilians.

These major conflicts included the war of December 2008-January 2009, November 2012, July-August 2014, May 2021, and the latest genocidal war commencing in October 2023.

Despite the immense destruction and the relentless siege, let alone external international and Arab pressures and isolation, the Strip somehow endured and even regenerated itself. Destroyed residences were rebuilt from the salvaged rubble, and resistance weaponry was also replenished, often utilizing unexploded Israeli munitions.

The October 7 Rupture

The October 7 Hamas operation, known as Al-Aqsa Flood, constituted a significant break from the established pattern that had endured for years.

For Palestinians, it represented the ultimate evolution of their armed struggle, a culmination of a process that commenced in the early 1950s and involved diverse groups and political ideologies. It served as a stark notification to Israel that the rules of engagement have irrevocably shifted, and that the besieged Palestinians refuse to submit to their supposed historical role of perpetual victimhood.

For Israel, the event was earth-shattering. It exposed the country’s vaunted military and intelligence as deeply flawed, and revealed that the country’s leadership assessment of Palestinian capabilities was fundamentally erroneous.

This failure followed the brief surge of confidence during the normalization campaign initiated by the US and Israel with pliable Arab and Muslim countries during Trump’s first term in office. At that time, it appeared as though the Palestinians and their cause had been rendered irrelevant in the broader Middle Eastern political landscape. Between a co-opted Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and besieged resistance movements in Gaza, Palestine was no longer a decisive factor in Israel’s pursuit of regional hegemony.

The centerpiece of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy, and his aspiration to conclude his long political career with the ultimate regional triumph, was suddenly obliterated. Enraged, disoriented, but also determined to restore all of Israel’s advantages since Oslo, Netanyahu embarked on a campaign of mass killing that, over the course of two years, culminated in one of the worst genocides in human history.

His methodical extermination of the Palestinians and overt desire to ethnically cleanse the survivors out of Gaza laid bare Israel and its Zionist ideology for their inherently violent character, thus allowing the world, especially Western societies, to fully perceive Israel for what it truly is, and what it has always been.

Resistance, Resilience, and Defeat

But the genuine fear that unified Israel, the US, and several Arab countries is the terrifying prospect that Resistance, particularly armed resistance, could re-emerge in Palestine, and by extension across the Middle East, as a viable force capable of threatening all autocratic and undemocratic regimes. This fear was dramatically amplified by the ascent of other non-state actors, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansarallah in Yemen, who collectively with the Gaza resistance managed to forge a formidable alliance that required direct US involvement in the conflict.

Even then, Israel failed to achieve any of its strategic objectives in Gaza, owing to the legendary resilience of the Palestinian people, but also the prowess of the resistance that managed to destroy over 2,000 Israeli military vehicles, including hundreds of the pride and joy of the Israeli military industry, the Merkava tank.

No Arab army has managed to exact this scale of military, political, and economic cost from Israel throughout the country’s violent existence of nearly eight decades. Though Israel and the US — and others, including some Arab countries and the PA — continue to demand the disarming of the resistance, such a demand is rationally nearly unattainable. Israel has dropped over 200,000 tons of explosives over Gaza over the course of two years to achieve that singular objective, and failed. There is no plausible reason to believe that it can achieve such a goal through political and economic pressures alone.

Not only did Israel fail in Gaza, or, more accurately in the words of many Israeli historians and retired army generals, was decisively defeated in Gaza, but Palestinians have managed to reassert Palestinian agency, including the legitimacy of all forms of resistance, as a winning strategy against Israeli colonialism and US-Western imperialism in the region. This explains the profound fear shared by all parties that Israel’s defeat in Gaza could fundamentally alter the entire regional power dynamics.

Though the US and its Western and Arab allies will persist in negotiating in an attempt to resurrect the almost 90-year-old Palestinian leader Abbas and his Oslo paradigm as the only viable alternatives for Palestinians, the medium and long-term consequences of the war are likely to present a starkly different reality, one where Oslo and its corrupted figures are definitively relegated to the past.

Finally, if we are to speak of a Palestinian victory in Gaza, it is a resounding triumph for the Palestinian people, their indomitable spirit, and their deeply rooted resistance that transcends faction, ideology, and politics.

All of this considered, it must also be clearly stated that the current ceasefire in Gaza cannot be misconstrued as a ‘peace plan’; it is a mere pause from the genocide, as there will certainly be a subsequent round of conflict, the nature of which depends heavily on what unfolds in the West Bank, indeed the entire region, in the coming months and years.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

13 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar 

As the winter months approach many people in Gaza continue to sleep outside as the cold freezing air starts to bite. They have been displaced countless times in this Israeli war and have nowhere to go as their homes have been bombed multiple times with the 2.2 million population turned into mass internal refugees.

One such family, without a husband, in south Gaza continues to sleep on the side of the road among the debris and moving cars and vehicles. Others, sleep in makeshift sheets and plastic, hastily hoisted to try and protect them and keep the freezing air out.

…On the roadside

“Don’t worry it will not fall down, now shut up and sleep”, a mother tells her little one who found a ramshackle place on the side of the road. “And the same goes for you,” she tells the other child.

But how can that be! “We are living on the pavement next to the road, among speeding cars, where people are moving, going up and down all the time,” she tells the Al Jazeera cameraman engulfed in the pitch dark surroundings. Only the passing cars offer a glimmer of light.

“In the night we are literally sleeping between the passing people, there is nothing to protect us. I try not to close my eyes because of the constant fear around us as men are constantly roaming up and down. This is not to say anything about the stray dogs and other animals who may come our way. I have to be alert to shoo them away.”

A car can be heard skidding nearby. “I stay awake as well because my child may suddenly get up and run to the road, and if a car hits him, it really wouldn’t be the fault of the driver. So I stay awake as I don’t want anyone to hurt my children,” she concludes.

But this is hard to believe in what has become a downtrodden chaotic world.

Living in Plastic

Next the scene changes with many tents huddled one against each other, trying to do with the latest modern living the war is now offering. The Gaza Strip has become proffused with tent cities, and with those labels, there are the underdogs – those who can’t offered the proper $1000 tents but have to sleep on the margins in derelict and tiny ‘holes” made of plastic sheets and/or light material that collapse at the sight of any wind.

“It’s like living outside, you can’t call this a place of living,” another one says referring to her small, plastic tent. Here there is no toilet, we have to ask other people’s living in proper tents to ‘do our business” and at times, forcing ourselves upon them but what can we do”, her voice can filter through the camera.

“At night we remain in fear because of the stray dogs who remain amongst us, howling between our tents. This is not to say anything about the creepy-crawlers and snakes. At night I beg my neighbors to let my two grown up daughters sleep in their tent while I remain with my other small children here, but it’s really a struggle.”

Her life has long become a complete misery. “At night my children freeze because there are no blankets, we barely have thin sheets to use as cover, there are no clothes here, we simply don’t have anything, they have to go bare foot, there are no shoes, not even sandals or flip-flops for them to wear.

There is neither food, nor drinks, we stay hungry all day except for the one-day meal the kids bring from the food charities the kids queue for. After that one meal, we wait for the following day hoping to be fed.”

Dry bread Sprinkled With Salt

“How can I describe the place, it’s bad,” says a haggard old man with a beard that keeps getting longer. “We have no tent to sleep in, winter is setting in and the rain is likely to lead to our death, first it was the scorching sun, God only knows how we survived then, now the winter is upon us, we just wait for the worse, the drenching rains, life is a constant challenge,” he says amidst the dirt-soil.

Even the water is hard to come, and this is for everyone, the rugs you see here were given to us by people whose situation is really no better than us. In terms of food, as God is my witness, the bread I have here from my feed, I collected, it’s dry and hard that has been sprinkled with salt. When I am hungry, I wet it with the available water and eat.  This is how we try to survive in Gaza today.”

These are a few of the voices from Gaza. For them, life has long become miserable. Here, they speak out of their dreary lives that have become a constant struggle for survival.

Dr Marwan Asmar is a journalist from Amman, Jordan

13 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ghassan Shahrour

The tragedy unfolding in Gaza continues to challenge the moral conscience of our world. Entire families have vanished under the rubble, hospitals lie in ruins, and generations of children carry trauma that no ceasefire can erase. For those of us who serve in the health and humanitarian fields, Gaza is not a headline — it is a wound in humanity’s body, still bleeding despite the promises of diplomacy.

As health professionals and advocates for disarmament, peace, and human rights, we are bound by an ethical duty: to defend life, to protect dignity, and to refuse silence when politics crush compassion. Peace cannot be built on selective empathy or on temporary calm that ignores the roots of injustice.

U.S. President Donald Trump now claims credit for the Gaza agreement, yet his record and articles of the agreement tell another story — one that reveals the gulf between words and deeds:

• He backed Israel’s war machine with billions in weapons. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project (Sept 2025), U.S. aid to Israel between Oct 2023 and Sept 2025 reached $33.77 billion.(Biden/Trump). It encompasses both aid to Israel and broader U.S. military activities in the Middle East.
• He punished the International Criminal Court for issuing arrest warrants against Israel’s Prime Minister, shielding war crimes from accountability — the first such act in modern history.
• He sanctioned Palestinian human rights groups that cooperated with the ICC.
• He repeatedly vetoed UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions, even when all other members supported them.
• His “peace plan” omitted international law, victims’ rights, and any commitment to end occupation or annexation.
• It excluded Palestinian representation, sidelined the UN, and promoted privatized reconstruction under business elites.

This is not peacemaking — it is power disguised as diplomacy.

This is not reconstruction — it is control through commerce.

True peace requires more than deals between governments. It demands accountability, justice, dignity, international humanitarian laws and Palestinian self-determination — not a “Riviera of the Middle East” built on rubble and repression. Genuine peace grows from truth and equity, not from silence and spectacle.

To talk about peace while avoiding the question of justice is to perpetuate an illusion. Every demolished home, every denied permit, every child deprived of medical care and education is not only a personal tragedy but a violation of international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment and attacks on civilians, yet such violations continue with impunity. When international law is applied selectively, it loses both its authority and its soul.

Peace that ignores accountability is fragile; peace without dignity is impossible. History has shown that oppression, when left unchallenged, reproduces itself under new names and flags. The lessons of South Africa, of Vietnam, of Bosnia — all remind us that reconciliation without justice merely postpones conflict.

As a medical doctor, I have seen how the human body mirrors the moral state of our societies. In Gaza’s hospitals, medical workers perform surgeries without anesthesia, parents search for missing children in the debris, and patients on dialysis die because fuel for generators has run out. These are not statistics — they are names, faces, and stories. They remind us that neutrality in the face of such suffering is not humanitarianism; it is complicity.

Disarmament, too, must be understood in moral terms. It is not only about reducing weapons stockpiles, but about dismantling the systems that arm injustice: unchecked power, economic greed, and the silence of those who know better. The architecture of impunity — built through vetoes, military aid, and political shielding — sustains the violence as much as the weapons themselves.

If humanity is to survive its own contradictions, it must reclaim moral clarity. The right to life, health, and safety cannot depend on geography or identity. The world cannot insist on accountability in one conflict while excusing atrocities in another. Selective outrage erodes the very foundation of universal human rights.

Peace is not a transaction; it is a transformation — of power into justice, of fear into dignity, of silence into truth and advocacy. It begins when we recognize that every life, Palestinian or otherwise, holds equal worth.

We must speak — for truth, for justice, for every person denied care, shelter, and recognition. The price of silence is far greater than the cost of courage.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.” — Noam Chomsky

Last but not least, only when we embrace that responsibility — as citizens, professionals, and human beings — can the world hope to move from ceasefire to peace, and from peace to justice.

Dr. Ghassan Shahrour is a medical doctor, writer, and human rights advocate specializing in health, disability, and disarmament.

13 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (QNN)- After months of forced displacement under Israeli threats, thousands of Palestinians are returning to their neighborhoods in northern Gaza, Gaza City and Khan Younis following the withdrawal of Israeli forces as part of the first phase of the ceasefire deal under Trump’s plan. But for many, the first question they ask friends and neighbors is not about safety, food, or water, it is a simple, painful question:

“Is your home still standing?”

For displaced families who fled under Israeli bombardment, this question now defines the emotional weight of return.

“I walked for hours to reach my home in the Sheikh Redwan neighborhood,” Amal Haboub, 42, who fled with her children to a UN shelter in central Gaza during the early days of the Israeli assault on Gaza City following an Israeli order, told QNN. “There was no roof. The walls are cracked and blackened. But it is still standing — and that’s more than I hoped for.”

Others weren’t as fortunate.

“My house is gone,” Mahmoud al-Jabari added to QNN while standing in front of a pile of rubble that used to be his family’s home in northern Gaza. “There is nothing to rebuild. I found my mother’s teacups buried in the dust. That’s all I have left.”

Across the strip, returning residents speak of neighborhoods transformed into wastelands. Entire streets are flattened, infrastructure is destroyed, and schools and hospitals bear the scars of war.

Despite the destruction, people are coming back, driven by the need to reclaim their land, their lives, and their dignity.

“I didn’t come to look for walls,” said Huda al-Najjar, a schoolteacher in Khan Younis. “I came to stand on my land, to show my children that we still exist.”

In some areas, families are now pitching tents beside the ruins of their homes, sweeping the rubble away, planting flags, and starting fires for tea, small acts of resistance and routine amid devastation.

“The Israeli genocide may have ended, but the suffering continues,” said Nouran Mohamed, a nurse at Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza. “We are dealing with trauma, injury, and immense psychological damage. And yet, people are showing resilience I cannot describe.”

Entisar Ashour, a resident of Tel Al-Hawa who was forced to flee under heavy Israeli attacks, told QNN that the “destruction is unbelievable. My family home—the place where we were raised and built so many memories, is gone.”

In mosques, markets, and makeshift shelters, the question repeats like a refrain:
“Is your home still standing?”

Sometimes, the answer is yes. More often, it’s silence. Or tears.

Still, life is returning to Gaza, slowly, painfully, as families piece together what remains and look toward rebuilding, not only their homes, but their futures.

11 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

There is no shortage of failed peace plans in occupied Palestine, all of them incorporating detailed phases and timelines, going back to the presidency of Jimmy Carter. They end the same way. Israel gets what it wants initially — in the latest case the release of the remaining Israeli hostages — while it ignores and violates every other phase until it resumes its attacks on the Palestinian people.

It is a sadistic game. A merry-go-round of death. This ceasefire, like those of the past, is a commercial break. A moment when the condemned man is allowed to smoke a cigarette before being gunned down in a fusillade of bullets.

Once Israeli hostages are released, the genocide will continue. I do not know how soon. Let’s hope the mass slaughter is delayed for at least a few weeks. But a pause in the genocide is the best we can anticipate. Israel is on the cusp of emptying Gaza, which has been all but obliterated under two years of relentless bombing. It is not about to be stopped. This is the culmination of the Zionist dream. The United States, which has given Israel a staggering $22 billion in military aid since Oct, 7, 2023, will not shut down its pipeline, the only tool that might halt the genocide.

Israel, as it always does, will blame Hamas and the Palestinians for failing to abide by the agreement, most probably a refusal — true or not — to disarm, as the proposal demands. Washington, condemning Hamas’s supposed violation, will give Israel the green light to continue its genocide to create Trump’s fantasy of a Gaza Riviera and “special economic zone” with its “voluntary”relocation of Palestinians in exchange for digital tokens.

Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, the current one is the least serious. Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire begins, it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement. And that is the point. It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand. Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only “rhetoric.”

Israel, in one example from the proposal, will “not return to areas that have been withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”

Who decides if Hamas has “fully implemented” the agreement? Israel. Does anyone believe in Israel’s good faith? Can Israel be trusted as an objective arbitrator of the agreement? If Hamas — demonized as a terrorist group — objects, will anyone listen?

How is it possible that a peace proposal ignores the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which reiterated that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end?

How can it fail to mention the Palestinian’s right to self-determination?

Why are Palestinians, who have a right under international law to armed struggle against an occupying power, expected to disarm while Israel, the illegally occupying force, is not?

By what authority can the U.S. establish a “temporary transitional government,” — Trump’s and Tony Blair’s so-called “Board of Peace” — sidelining the Palestinian right to self-determination?

Who gave the U.S. the authority to send to Gaza an “International Stabilization Force,” a polite term for foreign occupation?

How are Palestinians supposed to reconcile themselves to the acceptance of an Israeli “security barrier” on Gaza’s borders, confirmation that the occupation will continue?

How can any proposal ignore the slow-motion genocide and annexation of the West Bank?

Why is Israel, which has destroyed Gaza, not required to pay reparations?

What are Palestinians supposed to make of the demand in the proposal for a “deradicalized” Gazan population? How is this expected to be accomplished? Re-education camps? Wholesale censorship? The rewriting of the school curriculum? Arresting offending Imams in mosques?

And what about addressing the incendiary rhetoric routinely employed by Israeli leaders who describe Palestinians as “human animals” and their children as “little snakes”?

“All of Gaza and every child in Gaza, should starve to death,” the Israeli rabbi Ronen Shaulov announced. “I don’t have mercy for those who, in a few years, will grow up and won’t have mercy for us. Only a stupid fifth column, a hater of Israel has mercy for future terrorists, even though today they are still young and hungry. I hope, may they starve to death, and if anyone has a problem with what I’ve said, that’s their problem.”

Israeli violations of peace agreements have historical precedents.

The Camp David Accords, signed in 1978 by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin — without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — led to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt.

Subsequent phases of the Camp David Accords, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never implemented.

The 1993 Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, saw the PLO recognize Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. Yet, what ensued was the disempowerment of the PLO and its transformation into a colonial police force. Oslo II, signed in 1995, detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state. But it too was stillborn. It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” were to be delayed until “final” status talks. By then, Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were scheduled to have been completed. Governing authority was poised to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. Instead, the West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority had limited authority in Areas A and B while Israel controlled all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.

The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands that Jewish settlers seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law — was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. This instantly alienated many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees. As a consequence, many Palestinians abandoned the PLO in favor of Hamas. Edward Said called the Oslo Accords “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians.”

The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank when the Oslo agreement was signed. Their numbers today have increased to at least 700,000.

The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo “a sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”

Israel unilaterally broke the last two-month-long ceasefire on March 18 of this year when it launched surprise airstrikes on Gaza. Netanyahu’s office claimed that the resumption of the military campaign was in response to Hamas’s refusal to release hostages, its rejection of proposals to extend the cease-fire and its efforts to rearm. Israel killed more than 400 people in the initial overnight assault and injured over 500, slaughtering and wounding people as they slept. The attack scuttled the second stage of the agreement, which would have seen Hamas release the remaining living male hostages, both civilians and soldiers, for an exchange of Palestinian prisoners and the establishment of a permanent ceasefire along with the eventual lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Israel has carried out murderous assaults on Gaza for decades, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn.” No peace accord or ceasefire agreement has ever gotten in the way. This one will be no exception.

This bloody saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged: the dispossession and erasure of Palestinians from their land.

The only peace Israel intends to offer the Palestinians is the peace of the grave.

Chris Hedges worked for nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, National Public Radio and other news organizations in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans.

11 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

Author’s Note

This essay argues that the Nobel Peace Prize, in its current form, rewards imperial alignment while erasing anti-colonial resistance. Through recent examples — including the sidelining of Palestinian figures and the elevation of Western-aligned dissent — it exposes the Prize’s structural complicity and calls for a renaming that centers justice alongside peace.
 — -

I. The Illusion of Neutrality

Established in Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will to honor those advancing “fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the holding and promotion of peace congresses,” the Nobel Peace Prize was meant to champion genuine reconciliation.

Yet its history with Palestine exposes a stark contradiction: a selective benevolence rooted in Western realpolitik, where awards legitimize elite diplomats and state actors while marginalizing grassroots resistors—imprisoned Palestinian dissidents, martyred civilians, literary figures like Ghassan Kanafani, and humanitarian activists on flotillas like the Mavi Marmara. It is a ritual that endorses “peace efforts” divorced from justice, sustaining narratives of harmony amid occupation, displacement, apartheid, and systemic violence.

II. A Legacy of Stabilizing Injustice

This pattern repeats in the prize’s fault lines, rewarding gestures that contain rather than dismantle conflict.

• Henry Kissinger’s 1973 award celebrated Vietnam ceasefire talks while bolstering U.S. support for Israeli military dominance.
• Jimmy Carter’s 1978 honor for the Camp David Accords normalized Egypt-Israel ties but sidelined Palestinian statehood, leaving millions stateless.
• Barack Obama’s 2009 prize arrived amid surging U.S. military aid to Israel and vetoes of UN resolutions against settlement expansion.

These laureates exemplify peace as pacification—stabilizing power imbalances without addressing root inequities.

Donald Trump’s 2025 nomination fits this mold precisely. Backed by Benjamin Netanyahu and allies for his role in Israel-Hamas ceasefires and hostage exchanges, Trump’s bid ignored Palestinian calls for sovereignty, reparations, and recognition. Though rejected, it underscored the Committee’s tolerance for nominations that prioritize containment over liberation, echoing a pattern where imperial narratives masquerade as neutrality.

III. Selective Solidarity in 2025: Machado’s Award and Palestine’s Erasure

Nowhere is this clearer than in this year’s announcement: the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights.” Hiding from regime threats, Machado dedicated the honor to “the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support,” hailing him as a “courageous visionary,” even though it is U.S. sanctions that have crippled Venezuela’s economy by restricting its oil exports and access to global markets.

Her ascent, fueled by her positioning as a recognizable opposition figure, aligns with forms of dissent that are legible to Western institutions — those framed as pro-democracy, market-friendly, and compatible with U.S. foreign policy interests.

Yet her vocal solidarity with Israel — backing Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party through a 2020 cooperation agreement on politics, ideology, and security, and expressing support post-October 7 — exposes the irony: a “peace” laureate who champions the very forces fueling Gaza’s siege and genocide.

Global backlash ignited, decrying the award as a “Kissinger-level farce” that rewards conservative, Western-aligned figures while erasing anti-colonial resistance — from Venezuelan analysts slamming her calls for U.S. military intervention to X users labeling it proof “peace has lost its meaning.”

This echoes the Committee’s silence on Palestine: elevating struggles that reinforce U.S. interests, like Machado’s sanctions-backed “democracy,” while ignoring those threatening its foundations, such as Gaza’s aid flotillas, and cloaking both in peace rhetoric.

To starkly illustrate this bias, consider the following contrast:

On the one hand, María Corina Machado’s elevation reflects a broader pattern in which Western-aligned dissent is celebrated while anti-colonial resistance is systematically erased. Her advocacy for U.S. sanctions and military intervention in Venezuela, coupled with her alignment with Likud and praise for Trump, rendered her legible to dominant media narratives as a “heroic” figure.

On the other hand, Palestinian activists who confront U.S.-backed Israeli policies do so at immense personal risk, often enduring solitary confinement, targeted surveillance, and assassination. Figures like Ghassan Kanafani, assassinated by Mossad in 1972 for narrating dispossession through literature, and the passengers of the Mavi Marmara flotilla, killed in 2010 while attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, exemplify resistance that is punished rather than recognized.

Educational activists like Sireen Fraijeh, who opposed occupation in Nablus and survived military confinement, remain illegible to Western institutions. Even symbolic nominations — such as that of six-year-old Hind Rajab, killed by an Israeli tank shell while pleading for rescue — are buried under lobbying pressure, dismissed as politicized or “biased.”

These individuals and their legacies are not just overlooked; they are actively suppressed by mechanisms that reward imperial alignment and erase anti-colonial struggle from the global stage.

This disparity reveals not a neutral standard of peace, but a choreography of recognition that rewards imperial alignment and silences those who resist its violence.

Machado’s “peace” is imperial choreography, Palestinian resistance is inconvenient truth.

IV. Nominations as a Battleground of Narratives

The nomination process lays bare these inequities, turning symbolic recognition into a weapon.

Liberal Israeli-Palestinian NGOs, like the Parents Circle-Families Forum — which fosters joint bereavement workshops — are routinely spotlighted for “coexistence” efforts. Humane as they are, critics argue they humanize personal tragedies without confronting occupation’s structures, depoliticizing Palestinian suffering.

In visceral contrast, pro-Palestine icons languish: the posthumous nomination of six-year-old Hind Rajab, killed by an Israeli tank shell in Gaza City in January 2024 while pleading for rescue on a desperate phone call to paramedics — “I’m so scared, please come” — stands as a gut-wrenching symbol. Arizona State University Law Professor Khaled Beydoun, in consultation with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, submitted her bid to honor “every Palestinian child whose life has been stolen,” yet it fades amid the 338 candidates, overshadowed by Machado’s polished dissent.

This sidelining is not isolated.

UNRWA and UN Secretary-General António Guterres were also nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize — UNRWA for its humanitarian work amid the Gaza siege, and Guterres for his leadership in defending multilateral diplomacy and refugee rights. Yet both faced intense backlash from pro-Israel lobbying groups, who accused them of bias and called for their removal from consideration. Their nominations, like Hind’s, were not just overlooked —Pro-Israel lobbying groups targeted their nominations to suppress recognition of Palestinian suffering.

These patterns reveal a system where symbolic gestures are tolerated only when they align with dominant power structures, while voices that challenge those structures are buried under pressure.

V. Norway’s Parliament: A Mirror of Ideological Fault Lines

Norway’s Parliament, which appoints the Nobel Committee, embodies the ideological fault lines that shape the Prize’s selections.

In May 2024, the Norwegian government formally recognized the State of Palestine, joining Ireland and Spain in endorsing a two-state solution based on pre-1967 borders — a decisive shift away from the euphemistic legacy of the Oslo Accords toward a clearer global consensus on Palestinian sovereignty.

Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide framed the move as support for “moderate forces” and a necessary step toward peace, emphasizing that both Israelis and Palestinians have a right to live in secure, independent states.

This recognition was backed by a parliamentary majority, with strong support from left-leaning and centrist factions, labor unions, and civil society groups.

The Norwegian Labour Party, under pressure from its base, amplified calls for decolonization and human rights, aligning with the EU and Saudi Arabia in the Global Alliance for the so-called “two-state solution.”

May Day demonstrations across Oslo echoed this sentiment, with union leaders demanding an end to Israeli occupation and full recognition of Palestinian statehood.

Yet this momentum is countered by the Progress Party, Norway’s largest opposition bloc, which chairs the Israel Allies Caucus and maintains close ties to groups like the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem.

These affiliations reflect a theological and geopolitical alignment with Israeli settler narratives, and the party routinely frames pro-Palestinian solidarity as anti-democratic or extremist.

This internal polarization — between restorative justice and geopolitical fealty — renders the Nobel Committee not a neutral arbiter, but an extension of Norway’s domestic contest over empire, recognition, and resistance.

VI. Fractures from Gaza: Emerging Moral Reckonings

The Gaza genocide has shattered the Nobel Committee’s veneer of neutrality.

By July 2025, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had documented at least 186 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023 — over 70% of them Palestinian — in what CPJ calls the deadliest and most deliberate assault on press freedom in its history.

These deaths include targeted strikes such as the August 2025 killing of Al Jazeera journalists outside Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, where seven people — including three Al Jazeera correspondents — were deliberately attacked while sheltering in a media tent.

The toll averages three journalists per week, a staggering rate that underscores not only Nordic unease but a deeper moral abdication.

Despite this, the Nobel Committee refused to honor figures like UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, whose nomination was backed by over a million signatures through Avaaz and Change.org campaigns.
 Albanese’s tireless documentation of human rights violations in Gaza, and her outspoken condemnation of Israeli war crimes, drew political backlash — including U.S. sanctions — but also widespread support.

Albanese’s exclusion from the laureate list sparked global rebuke, especially as the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), a key intellectual guide for the Committee, shortlisted CPJ for its documentation of these atrocities.

This dissonance has galvanized younger parliamentarians and civil society actors across Europe, particularly in Norway, where protests surged in response to the Committee’s silence on Gaza.
 Demonstrators demanded laureates who embody justice, intersectionality, and decolonization — not sanitized diplomacy.
 Their calls reflect a shifting ethical landscape, one that rejects peace devoid of equity and transparency.

In this context, Donald Trump’s nomination — once framed as a stabilizing gesture for his role in ceasefire negotiations — now appears as a relic of eroding consensus, mistaking complicity for peace.

Similarly, Machado’s laurels, awarded despite her alignment with Likud and support for U.S. intervention, mask colonial complicity under the guise of democratic virtue.

The cracks are no longer symbolic — they are seismic, evidenced by mass civil society mobilizations across Europe, deepening splits within Norway’s Parliament over Palestine recognition, and global backlash against the Nobel Committee’s nomination choices.

These ruptures signal not just discomfort, but a structural reckoning with the Prize’s complicity in sustaining geopolitical hierarchies.

VII. Toward a Prize for Justice

To restore moral clarity and confront the Prize’s complicity in imperial hierarchies, I propose renaming it the Nobel Prize for Peace and Justice.

This change is not only necessary — it is entirely doable, with historic precedent: in 1968, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences was added to the original five Nobel categories, demonstrating that the Nobel framework is flexible when institutions deem it ethically urgent or structurally necessary.

Renaming the award to the Nobel Prize for Peace and Justice would mark a paradigm shift in the Committee’s values — recognizing that peace without justice is hollow, and that true laureateship demands confrontation with structural violence, not mere diplomatic restraint. Far from a cosmetic gesture, this change would redefine how global institutions understand moral courage, resistance, and repair, expanding the criteria to include decolonial struggle, human rights advocacy, and institutional courage. It would signal that peace, to be worthy of recognition, must be inseparable from justice, and that strategic moderation alone is no longer sufficient grounds for honor.

Such a revision would reshape the nomination landscape, inviting figures and movements whose legacies have been historically suppressed or rendered illegible by imperial frameworks.
 Consider the following hypothetical laureates:

• Hind Rajab, the six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by an Israeli tank shell while pleading for rescue, whose posthumous nomination honored “every Palestinian child whose life has been stolen.”
   Her recognition would affirm that innocence amid atrocity is not apolitical, and that bearing witness to suffering is itself a form of resistance.
• Ghassan Kanafani, assassinated by Mossad in 1972 for narrating Palestinian dispossession through literature, whose work fused artistic brilliance with revolutionary clarity.
   A justice-oriented Prize would acknowledge that storytelling under siege is not peripheral, it is foundational to liberation.
• UNRWA, relentlessly attacked for its humanitarian work amid the Gaza siege, would be honored not for neutrality, but for steadfastness in the face of geopolitical vilification.
   Its nomination would reflect a commitment to institutional courage, not just diplomatic decorum.

In contrast, past recipients like Barack Obama (awarded in 2009 for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy”) or Juan Manuel Santos (honored for negotiating peace with FARC) were celebrated for strategic restraint, ceasefire diplomacy, and alignment with Western interests — not for confronting the structural roots of violence.
 Their legibility hinged on geopolitical convenience, not principled confrontation.

A renamed Prize would reorient the Committee’s compass toward those who challenge empire, not accommodate it.

It would elevate intersectional justice, decolonial resistance, and grassroots courage — not just statecraft or symbolic gestures.

It would also respond to growing global demands for ethical consistency, especially in light of recent controversies surrounding laureates whose actions reinforce geopolitical hierarchies rather than dismantle them — from Barack Obama’s drone warfare to Juan Manuel Santos’s post-accord paramilitarism, from Donald Trump’s ceasefire theatrics to Aung San Suu Kyi’s defense of military atrocities against the Rohingya.

In short, renaming the Prize would not rewrite its history — but it could reshape its future.

It would affirm that peace, to be meaningful, must be anchored in justice, and that recognition must extend to those who resist violence, not just those who negotiate its terms.

Note: First published in Medium

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.

11 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Shujaat Ali Quadri

For more than a century, the Nobel Peace Prize has been portrayed as the world’s most prestigious recognition of those who champion peace, democracy, and human rights. Yet beneath its celebrated veneer lies a deeper, more troubling reality: the prize has often been less about genuine peacemaking and more about legitimising the geopolitical and ideological priorities of the West  particularly those of the United States and its allies. The 2025 nomination and global media praise of Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado is only the latest chapter in this pattern, one that reveals how the Nobel Peace Prize is routinely used as a soft power instrument to reward pro-Western actors and advance capitalist, U.S. aligned interests.

When Alfred Nobel conceived the Peace Prize in 1895, his intention was to honour individuals and organisations that had “done the most or best work for fraternity between nations.” However, over time, this noble aspiration has been co-opted by political calculations. Particularly after World War II, the Nobel Committee based in Norway but deeply influenced by Euro-Atlantic geopolitical thinking has shown a clear preference for laureates whose work aligns with Western narratives of democracy, free markets, and liberal interventionism.

Figures such as Henry Kissinger (1973) and Barack Obama (2009) are telling examples. Kissinger’s award, given despite his direct involvement in brutal wars and coups from Vietnam to Chile, was widely seen as a reward for advancing U.S. hegemony under the guise of diplomacy. Obama, awarded the prize less than a year into his presidency, had not yet made any significant contribution to peace but he represented a refreshing, liberal U.S. face to the world. Both cases illustrated a pattern: the Nobel Peace Prize often functions as a seal of approval for those who protect, expand, or legitimise Western global influence.

The Case of María Corina Machado

The recent glorification of María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition leader hailed in Western media as a “defender of democracy,” perfectly illustrates this trend. Machado’s political trajectory has been deeply intertwined with Washington’s agenda in Latin America. A staunch critic of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, she has consistently advocated neoliberal economic policies and aligned herself with U.S. efforts to isolate, delegitimise, and ultimately overthrow the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.

While Machado and her supporters claim to fight for “democratic change,” her politics often overlap with Washington’s regime-change playbook. She has openly supported U.S. sanctions measures that have crippled Venezuela’s economy and caused immense suffering to ordinary Venezuelans. Moreover, she has participated in parallel “shadow governments” backed by the United States, directly undermining Venezuelan sovereignty and the outcomes of its electoral processes.

Yet despite this or rather because of it Western institutions and think tanks have lionised Machado as a symbol of democracy and resistance. The fact that she was even considered a frontrunner for the Nobel Peace Prize demonstrates how far the award has strayed from its original mission. Machado’s nomination is not about rewarding peace or reconciliation; it is about legitimising a U.S.-friendly political project in a region historically targeted by American interventionism.

The Nobel Committee’s ideological bias is perhaps most evident in who it chooses not to honour. Grassroots leaders, anti-imperialist movements, and activists who challenge Western dominance are routinely overlooked. Figures like Malcolm X, Fidel Castro, or even Nelson Mandela (honoured only after the end of apartheid when he was no longer a revolutionary threat) were sidelined or demonised until their causes became politically convenient.

Even more striking is the absence of recognition for whistleblowers like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, whose revelations about Western surveillance and war crimes arguably contributed more to global peace and accountability than many past laureates. Their exclusion reflects the uncomfortable truth that the Nobel Peace Prize is rarely awarded to those who challenge Western power  only to those who reinforce or sanitise it.

Seen in this light, the Nobel Peace Prize functions less as a neutral arbiter of moral virtue and more as a strategic tool of Western soft power. It amplifies voices that support liberal capitalism and U.S.-led global order while marginalising alternative visions of justice, sovereignty, or post-colonial solidarity. It transforms political actors into global icons not for their universal contribution to peace, but for their usefulness to a particular geopolitical narrative.

This dynamic also serves a domestic purpose within the West: by celebrating figures like Machado, the Nobel Committee signals to global audiences that democracy and human rights are synonymous with Western leadership, even when that leadership is tied to coercive sanctions, military interventions, or economic exploitation.

If the Nobel Peace Prize is to retain its moral authority, it must free itself from ideological captivity. It must recognise that peace is not merely the absence of war or the spread of free markets, but the dismantling of structural violence  including the economic and political systems that perpetuate inequality, imperialism, and neocolonialism. This would mean rewarding those who resist oppression in all its forms, not just those sanctioned by Washington or Brussels.

Until then, we must view each Nobel Peace Prize announcement with a critical eye. The applause and glowing headlines that follow are often less about honouring genuine peacemakers and more about reaffirming the global order as defined by Western interests.

The case of María Corina Machado is a stark reminder: when the world’s most prestigious peace award is used to validate regime change politics and neoliberal orthodoxy, it ceases to be a symbol of peace. It becomes, instead, a weapon wielded not for humanity, but for hegemony.

Dr Shujaat Ali Quadri is the National Chairman of Muslim Students Organisation of India MSO, he writes on a wide range of issues, including, Sufism, Public Policy, Geopolitics and Information Warfare.

11 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Michelle Ellner

When I saw the headline Maria Corina Machado wins the Peace Prize, I almost laughed at the absurdity. But I didn’t, because there’s nothing funny about rewarding someone whose politics have brought so much suffering. Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there’s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.

If this is what counts as “peace” in 2025, then the prize itself has lost every ounce of credibility. I’m Venezuelan-American, and I know exactly what Machado represents. She’s the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatization, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.

Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help “liberate” Venezuela with bombs under the banner of “freedom,” She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects – as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown – have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.

Machado has spent her entire political life promoting division, eroding Venezuela’s sovereignty, and denying its people the right to live with dignity.

This is who Maria Corina Machado really is:

• She helped lead the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew a democratically elected president, and signed the Carmona Decree that erased the Constitution and dissolved every public institution overnight.
• She worked hand in hand with Washington to justify regime change, using her platform to demand foreign military intervention to “liberate” Venezuela through force.
• She cheered on Donald Trump’s threats of invasion and his naval deployments in the Caribbean, a show of force that risks igniting regional war under the pretext of “combating narcotrafficking.” While Trump sent warships and froze assets, Machado stood ready to serve as his local proxy, promising to deliver Venezuela’s sovereignty on a silver platter.
• She pushed for the U.S. sanctions that strangled the economy, knowing exactly who would pay the price: the poor, the sick, the working class. 
• She helped construct the so-called “interim government,” a Washington-backed puppet show run by a self-appointed “president” who looted Venezuela’s resources abroad while children at home went hungry.
• She vows to reopen Venezuela’s embassy in Jerusalem, aligning herself openly with the same apartheid state that bombs hospitals and calls it self-defense.
• Now she wants to hand over the country’s oil, water, and infrastructure to private corporations. This is the same recipe that made Latin America the laboratory of neoliberal misery in the 1990s.

Machado was also one of the political architects of La Salida, the 2014 opposition campaign that called for escalated protests, including guarimba tactics. Those weren’t “peaceful protests” as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government’s fall. Streets were blocked with burning trash and barbed wire, buses carrying workers were torched, and people suspected of being Chavista were beaten or killed. Even ambulances and doctors were attacked. Some Cuban medical brigades were nearly burned alive. Public buildings, food trucks, and schools were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods were held hostage by fear while opposition leaders like Machado cheered from the sidelines and called it “resistance.”

She praises Trump’s “decisive action” against what she calls a “criminal enterprise,” aligning herself with the same man who cages migrant children and tears families apart under ICE’s watch, while Venezuelan mothers search for their children disappeared by U.S. migration policies.

Machado isn’t a symbol of peace or progress. She is part of a global alliance between fascism, Zionism, and neoliberalism, an axis that justifies domination in the language of democracy and peace. In Venezuela, that alliance has meant coups, sanctions, and privatization. In Gaza, it means genocide and the erasure of a people. The ideology is the same: a belief that some lives are disposable, that sovereignty is negotiable, and that violence can be sold as order.

If Henry Kissinger could win a Peace Prize, why not María Corina Machado? Maybe next year they’ll give one to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for “compassion under occupation.”

Every time this award is handed to an architect of violence disguised as diplomacy, it spits in the face of those who actually fight for peace: the Palestinian medics digging bodies from rubble, the journalists risking their lives in Gaza to document the truth and the humanitarian workers of the Flotilla sailing to break the siege and deliver aid to starving children in Gaza, with nothing but courage and conviction.

But real peace is not negotiated in boardrooms or awarded on stages. Real peace is built by women organizing food networks during blockades, by Indigenous communities defending rivers from extraction, by workers who refuse to be starved into obedience, by Venezuelan mothers mobilizing to demand the return of children seized under U.S. ICE and migration policies and by nations that choose sovereignty over servitude. That’s the peace Venezuela, Cuba, Palestine, and every nation of the Global South deserves.

 Tell the Nobel Committee: The Peace Prize belongs to Gaza’s journalists, not María Corina Machado!

Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK.

10 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Roger D. Harris

Spoiler alert – it already has. This is not a glib answer but a comment on the nature of the conflict. The US mission to wrench Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution out from its roots has a quarter-century pedigree. Stick around to the end of the article for an assessment of the likelihood of an overt military attack inside Venezuela. But first a little historical context.

Regime change has failed…so far

In 2002, a US-backed military coup temporarily ousted Hugo Chávez. A mere 47 hours later, the people of Venezuela spontaneously arose and returned their rightfully elected president.

Washington has persistently interfered in the internal affairs of Venezuela, pouring millions of dollars to rig elections. Yet, the perpetually divided and unpopular US-fostered opposition is more isolated and discredited than ever.

Undeterred by its 2002 failed coup, the US has repeatedly sponsored attempts to achieve by violence what they could not do by interfering in Venezuelan elections. In 2020, the so-called “Operation Gideon” was designed to kidnap President Maduro. Derisively dubbed the “Bay of Piglets,” this coup attempt along with numerous others failed. Local fisher folk apprehended the mercenaries.

Among the many diplomatic efforts at regime change by Washington, the Lima Group was cobbled together in 2017. The cabal of 11 rightwing Latin American states and Canada aspired to facilitate “a peaceful exit” to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. By 2021, nearly half of the Lima Group countries had elected progressive governments and that diplomatic offensive fizzled.

Meanwhile in 2019, the US anointed unknown 35-year-old Juan Guaidó as “interim president” of Venezuela. On December 21, 2022, his own opposition found the puppet so toxic and corrupt that they gave him the boot.

Previously in 2015, Barack Obama certified that Venezuela was an “extraordinary threat” to US national security. He imposed unilateral coercive measures designed to destroy the Venezuelan economy. Euphemistically called “sanctions,” this form of collective punishment is illegal under international law. Regardless, each subsequent US president has continued and to varying degrees augmented the economic warfare.

Combined with oil commodity prices cratering – the source of almost all of its foreign earnings – Venezuela experienced the largest peacetime economic contraction in recent world history. Inflation reached 2,000,000% and the days of the Bolivian Revolution appeared to be numbered. However by 2023, in a heroic effort under the resolute political leadership of President Maduro, Venezuela reversed the economic freefall and recorded a 5% GDP growth rate, which has continued in a positive direction.

US trapped in its imperial imperative

Without further detailing the multitude of illegal US regime-change machinations, it is sufficient to say that the very successes of the Venezuelans have forced Uncle Sam to escalate the conflict. Forced because, as an imperial power, the United States is structurally driven by its inherent pursuit of hegemony – rule over all potential challengers. This compulsion is codified in its official security doctrine of “full-spectrum dominance.”

Venezuela has indeed been a challenge. Even before Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998, former President Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized the country’s oil reserves – the largest in the world – in 1976. Chávez increased state control over the oil industry and expropriated international oil company assets.

Chávez’s precedent of using the country’s natural resources – including Venezuela’s substantial reserves of natural gas, iron ore, bauxite, gold, coal, and diamonds – to fund social programs, rather than handing them over for private profit, is anathema to the US. Not only does the imperium lust over the oil for its own corporations, but control of such strategic resources are geopolitically critical for maintaining global dominance.

Venezuela has also been a leader in promoting regional unity that is independent of the US, forging alliances such as CELCA and ALBA. It is a close ally with Nicaragua and Cuba, also on the US enemies list. Through OPEC, Friends in Defense of the UN Charter, and other initiatives, Venezuela has encouraged Latin American unity with Africa and Asia. Venezuela has “strategic partnerships” with China and Russia and is close to Iran. A champion of Palestine, it broke relations with Israel in 2009. Venezuela also supports an emerging multilateral international community.

For all these “offenses,” the Bolivarian Revolution’s existence is insufferable to the Yankee hegemon…to be crushed.

The guard rails are down

Trump is operating with virtually zero institutional constraints. A mere five congressional Democrats recently awoke from their slumber to send a letter meekly suggesting that presidential “powers are not limitless.” But the Senate just voted against a war powers resolution to constrain attacks on Venezuela.

Democrat representatives on the House Foreign Affairs Committee posted on X: “Trump and Rubio are pushing for regime change in Venezuela. The American people don’t want another war.” However, their colleagues in the Senate provided a unanimous mandate to the very same Republicans who ran on a “Maduro must go” platform. They rushed to do so, without debate, in the very first hours of the new administration.

Within the bipartisan consensus for regime change in Venezuela, the differences are cosmetic. The Democrats would prefer to overthrow the sovereign state “legally.” Truthout reports that some senior Democrats warned “fellow members against opposing Trump’s war, saying that it would be tantamount to throwing their support behind Maduro.” If the Republicans precipitate an attack, the Democrats at best will agree with the ends but not the means.

The follow-the-flag press prepares public opinion for a strike

On September 26, NBC News reported “from the White House” that the US is planning strikes inside Venezuela. The one-minute video is actually of a guy standing in the street outside the White House, claiming that he had chatted with four unidentified “sources.” Subsequently, this unsubstantiated scoop went viral, picked up by almost every major corporate press outlet. 

The New York Times editorialized: “Mr. Trump has grown frustrated with Mr. Maduro’s failure to accede to American demands to give up power voluntarily and the continued insistence by Venezuelan officials that they have no part in drug trafficking.” What doesn’t occur to these Pentagon scribes, is that neither has Mr. Trump shown any enthusiasm for giving up power voluntarily or even admitting to the documented conclusion by the US in drug trafficking.

In one of its typical propaganda pieces trying to pass as a news story, the Times tells us “what we know” about Washington’s offensive against Venezuela: “the endgame remains opaque.” Apparently, they don’t know jack, because the endgame is regime change. In remarks aimed at Venezuela, Mr. Trump threatened: “We will blow you out of existence.”

All the elements are in place for a strike inside Venezuela          

• Diplomatic relations with Venezuela have been broken since 2019.
• In 2020, the US indicted President Maduro for narco-terrorism, placing a $15 million bounty on him, subsequently raised to $25m and now $50m.
• On January 20, Trump took office. Executive Order 14157 declared a “national emergency” and designated international drug-trafficking groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTOs) and “specially designated global terrorists,” citing authority under the Alien Enemies Act.
• By February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that FTOs posed an “existential threat” and laid the groundwork for treating cartels allegedly linked to President Maduro as enemy combatants.
•  In May, the administration opened the path to use military force against FTOs.
• Then in July, a “secret directive” authorized military operations against FTOs at sea and on foreign soil.
• By August, the US launched a massive naval deployment off the coast of Venezuela. By October, troop deployment reportedly reached 10,000.
• On September 2, the US blew up the first of four or five alleged drug boats in international waters off of Venezuela, resulting in extrajudicial murders of the crews.
• By mid-September, the Pentagon notified Congress under the War Powers Resolution that US forces were engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels.
• This was followed on October 1 by the Defense Department’s “confidential memo” and more congressional briefings that the US was engaged in armed conflict.
• Trump then terminated the last back-channel diplomatic contacts with Venezuela.

If the “international community” can’t halt the ongoing US/zionist genocide in Palestine, the Yankee juggernaut faces little effective resistance in the Caribbean. A US attack inside Venezuela is imminent!

Roger D. Harris, a founding member of the Venezuela Solidarity Network, is on the board of the Task Force on the Americas and on the secretariat of the US Peace Council.

10 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org