Israel Mocks Trump’s “Peace Plan”

By Kevin Barrett, for American Free Press

Was US President Trump’s ceasefire agreement, signed by Israel and Hamas October 10, a step in the right direction? Many observers were skeptical, citing the pact’s vagueness and Israel’s record of shamelessly violating virtually every agreement it has ever signed.

Others extended Trump the benefit of the doubt. They pointed out that the US theoretically has complete leverage over Israel, which can’t survive without lavish American largesse. Given Israel’s complete dependence on the US taxpayer, Trump could easily force the Israelis to adhere to the agreement if he genuinely wanted to.

Thus far, the skeptics’ case has prevailed. Israel has violated Trump’s so-called ceasefire almost 800 times, killing nearly 400 people, the vast majority unarmed civilians. And it has refused to comply with the ceasefire’s key tenet: complete withdrawal from Gaza. That was supposed to happen in coordination with the establishment of an internationally-coordinated stabilization force, consisting of a unified Palestinian entity administering a technocratic government to which Hamas would defer as it disarmed.

But Israel is preventing the creation of the unified Palestinian administration that is central to Trump’s peace plan. The Palestinian leader who could bring together all the factions is Marwan Barghouti, who remains in an Israeli prison in ill health under incessant torture. Thus far, Trump has refused to force Israel to release Barghouti. So the ceasefire has not moved past phase one, which Hamas has honored while Israel has not, into the phase two that would end the genocide.

That failure is deliberate. Israel has systematically undermined the ceasefire in myriad ways, not only by continuing to massacre Gazans, but also by allowing vastly less food and humanitarian supplies into Gaza than Trump’s ceasefire obliges them to. According to the Trump-brokered agreement, Israel must allow 600 trucks per day into Gaza. The United Nations reports that Israel has violated that provision by limiting the number of trucks to barely over 100 per day. As a result, Palestinians are still dying of starvation and exposure. Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem University reported last weekend that fourteen Palestinian children died of exposure in a single day, as cold winter rains drench communities that have been systematically denied adequate nutrition, clothing, and shelter after Israel bombed their homes into rubble.

What does Israel hope to gain from such cruelty? Real estate. The Israelis are committing genocide—massacring people by the tens of thousands with the intention of expelling the survivors—so they can steal their victims’ property. And that is what they have been doing continuously, sometimes quickly and other times more gradually, since the Palestinian genocide began in earnest in 1948.

Though the official number of Gazans murdered since October 7 is currently around 70,000, that number represents only people directly killed by Israel whose bodies have been identified. Countless others have died from starvation, disease, and exposure, while still more lie rotting under rubble that remains to be excavated. (Virtually all of Gaza has been bombed to rubble.) The real number of victims is undoubted well over 100,000 and probably closer to the nearly 700,000 estimated by Ralph Nader.

But Israel has failed to remove most of the population of Gaza, which still numbers at least 1.5 million, down from the 2.2 million before the genocide intensified in 2023. So rather than steal all of Gaza at once, Netanyahu has settled on a plan to gobble up half of Gaza under the guise of the ceasefire’s “Yellow Line” provision. Trump’s ceasefire required Israel to immediately withdraw from almost half of Gaza to behind a Yellow Line. Then it would permanently depart from all of Gaza as soon as Phase 2 began. But Netanyahu, as we have seen, is systematically violating the ceasefire and obstructing Phase 2. That’s because Israel has no intention of honoring the agreement and withdrawing. “The Yellow Line is a new border line,” IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir has announced.

Zamir’s announcement represents a slap in the face to Donald Trump and his peace plan. By making the Yellow Line the new Israel-Gaza border, Israel would be stealing more than half of Gaza. That’s not what the peace agreement says. It requires Israel to withdraw from all of Gaza.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a nation whose top leaders are wanted for genocide by the ICC is refusing to honor its ceasefire obligations. Israel is also continuing to bomb Lebanon even though it signed a ceasefire with that country. It is continuing to illegally occupy vast stretches of Syria. It is accelerating its genocide of the West Bank, where vicious attacks on Palestinian civilians by settlers and their Israeli Defense Forces protectors are a daily occurrence.

Why won’t Trump force Israel into a lasting peace? What do they have on him?

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