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