MADRID - In the days following the announcement of an “indefinite ceasefire” with Hamas, the promised truce was never genuinely implemented by Israel. 

Rather than an actual pause, Israeli military forces continued a regime of violations—shelling, drone patrols, tank deployments near civilian areas, and surveillance—effectively ensuring that violence persisted unabated. Gaza's neighborhoods, including Beit Lahia and Shujaiya, were subjected to recurrent strikes, with residential buildings, makeshift schools, and emergency clinics targeted. 

This breakdown of the ceasefire is neither accidental nor a temporary excess; it is part of a political logic deeply embedded in Israel’s strategic doctrine. Since the ceasefire took effect in early October, Gaza’s media office has documented at least 80 violations by Israel, resulting in 100 Palestinian deaths and 230 wounded, with breaches including shelling, deliberate targeting of civilians, gunfire, and arrests across Gaza’s governorates. These actions, utilizing tanks stationed near residential areas, drones equipped with live-fire capabilities, and electronic surveillance technologies, highlight that the truce functions less as a genuine cessation of hostilities than as a tactical instrument to maintain domination and continual pressure on Gaza’s population.

While figures such as J.D. Vance, the current Vice President of the United States, and Steve Witkoff, the U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East, insist that the ceasefire remains in effect and tout it as a diplomatic breakthrough, these claims collapse under even minimal scrutiny. The truth is that the ceasefire was never genuinely implemented. Bombardments have continued, the blockade remains suffocating, and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has only deepened.

Such pronouncements—wrapped in the rhetoric of peace, stability, and compassion—expose the profound hypocrisy underpinning Trump’s so-called peace plan. Far from reflecting progress, this narrative functions as political theater: a convenient façade meant to project control and moral leadership while deflecting attention from ongoing atrocities. The “ceasefire” serves less as a mechanism for peace and more as a public relations tool, preserving geopolitical optics at the expense of Palestinian lives.

Gaza: An enclave under an illusory truce

Israeli policy toward Gaza rests on the perpetual management of crisis. Rather than seeking resolution, Israel administers collapse. Since the 2014 war —and even earlier, since the blockade of 2007— Gaza has lived in a continuous state of exception, where normality is defined only as minimal survival. The so-called ceasefires operate as administrative pauses in a structural conflict: they allow Israel to regroup forces, test surveillance systems, redefine energy boundaries, and tighten the economic blockade under the appearance of compliance with a humanitarian agreement.

During these intervals, Gaza’s population experiences a phantom truce. Drones continue to hover overhead, selective incursions persist, and access to essential goods, construction materials, and fuel remains restricted. Israeli authorities use the language of security to justify what is, in reality, a policy of demographic and territorial control. The “ceasefire,” in this sense, becomes a form of administrative warfare: less visible, but equally devastating.

This dynamic serves a clear purpose: to neutralize Palestinian political sovereignty, dissolve resistance into mere humanitarian management, and reduce politics itself to the administration of suffering. The collapse of each truce is not a system failure but its central mechanism. Gaza, like southern Lebanon before it, functions today as a laboratory for a military and technological doctrine that fuses collective punishment, surveillance, and economic suffocation to maintain total control without the political cost of formal occupation.

The Lebanese mirror: A model of colonial occupation

The model applied in Gaza did not emerge in a vacuum. It draws from Israel’s experience in southern Lebanon, where the formal withdrawal in 2000 did not end the occupation but transformed it into a regime of constant harassment. Since then, Israel has maintained near-constant aerial and intelligence presence over Lebanese territory, violating its airspace through reconnaissance flights, preemptive bombings, and sabotage operations.

The so-called “lasting ceasefire” on the Lebanese front required —and still requires— the complete withdrawal of Hezbollah behind the Litani River, while Israel reserves for itself full military freedom south of it. This asymmetry destroys any effective sovereignty over Lebanese land and turns the very notion of peace into a colonial instrument. In this equation, a truce does not mean the end of war, but its institutionalization under rules dictated by the occupying power.

Lebanon and Gaza are, in that sense, two manifestations of the same logic: an unequal peace that demands submission and renunciation of the right to resist as the price of survival.

Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran: Interconnected fronts of a single logic

Far from being confined to Palestinian geography, this doctrine of control extends across a broader regional architecture. The axis connecting Gaza, southern Lebanon, and Iran reveals a coherent strategy: to prevent the emergence of any actor capable of exercising real deterrence or military autonomy against Israel.

After the brief but intense twelve-day war, Israel sought to impose on Tehran a framework similar to that applied in Gaza: a model of “shared security” in which only one participant —Israel— retains initiative and monopoly over legitimate force.

This regional order, disguised as counterterrorist cooperation or security equilibrium, rests on a structural hierarchy: Israeli military supremacy, guaranteed by Western support, and the subordination of all others. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran —despite their profound political differences— embody diverse expressions of a single refusal: the rejection of an order in which their sovereignty exists only by external permission.

The semantics of the ceasefire: Normalizing asymmetric violence

On the international stage, Israel has succeeded in imposing a semantics of violence that presents it as inevitable. The term “ceasefire” has been emptied of its political content, reduced to a diplomatic tool for managing the humanitarian consequences of occupation without questioning its structural causes.

Whenever a new offensive erupts, international organizations repeat familiar formulas: “restore calm,” “avoid a humanitarian catastrophe,” “allow the entry of aid.” Yet calm is not peace; it is merely the normalization of siege. This humanitarian narrative shifts the debate from politics —sovereignty, self-determination, justice— to the technical management of suffering. Reports count sacks of flour and hours of electricity, but not borders, land, or freedom.

The truce thus becomes a discourse functional to the existing order: an apparent solution that preserves the status quo. Violence is administered, measured, and presented as a natural phenomenon of the region, while the very idea of Palestinian sovereignty is dissolved in the margins of humanitarian reports.

Palestinian resistance: A symbolic and political logic

Within this context, Hamas’s response —beyond its ideology or military strategy— acquires a political and symbolic dimension that transcends the battlefield. Its arsenal, limited in range and accuracy, is not meant to match Israel’s military capacity but to challenge the narrative of its invulnerability. Each rocket piercing Israeli airspace is also a political statement: the existence of a people refusing to vanish as a political subject.

This resistance, fragmented and often instrumentalized, serves as a reminder that unilateral pacification of the enclave is impossible. Israel can demolish buildings, tunnels, and arsenals, but it cannot eradicate the act of resistance that gives meaning to Palestinian identity. In that act lies the persistence of a sovereignty that survives even in collapse.

Israel’s Calculation: Fragmentation and Control

In recent years, Israel’s war on Gaza has evolved into a technological laboratory of control without precedent. What was once a visible territorial occupation has turned into algorithmic domination. Israel has perfected an ecosystem of surveillance grounded in artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and mass data analysis, transforming an entire population into a set of predictive patterns. Technology no longer serves merely to defend; it has become the central weapon of a perpetual war that administers life and death with mathematical precision.

Within this framework, the ceasefire does not mark a humanitarian pause but a technical phase. During those intervals, Israel’s military apparatus calibrates its systems, refines algorithms, expands biometric databases, and tests new tools of social control. Each cycle of violence becomes a more efficient technological iteration, refined and exportable under the label of “smart security.” Occupation is digitalized: boots are replaced by drones, walls by sensors, physical surveillance by an electronic panopticon that regulates every Palestinian movement. Gaza is both a battlefield and a testing ground.

This measured violence is compounded by financial control over humanitarian aid. Funds allocated for Gaza’s reconstruction are filtered, conditioned, or outright blocked, ensuring that every attempt at recovery remains subject to Israeli approval. Gaza thus becomes a suspended territory, permanently unfinished —a place where life is rebuilt only to be destroyed again.

Iran and the regional perspective

From Tehran, the collapse of the Gaza ceasefire is not viewed as an isolated incident but as part of a broader confrontation between two conceptions of sovereignty. For Iran, Palestinian resistance plays an indispensable deterrent role: it prevents Israel from consolidating absolute regional hegemony under Western protection.

Iran’s support —political more than military— stems from a strategic reading: as long as Gaza resists, Israel’s security architecture cannot stabilize. In that resistance, Iran sees the continuation of its own struggle to preserve a sovereignty unaligned with Washington or Tel Aviv. Thus, the conflict in Gaza becomes one chapter in a wider contest over the right of states —and peoples— to define their own destinies outside the structures of global domination.

The Erosion of International Law and Its Marginal Role

The prolongation of violence has laid bare the impotence of international law. Institutions meant to ensure proportionality in the use of force or to protect civilians have been reduced to arenas of symbolic condemnation. Israel redefines the concept of “self-defense” to justify massive assaults, while the international community responds with tepid statements and calls for restraint.

This degradation is not only legal but moral: the selective application of international norms corrodes trust in the multilateral system. Gaza thus exposes the crisis of legitimacy within the contemporary global order, where force overrides law and impunity becomes routine.

Looking ahead: Sovereignty and resistance

The collapse of the Gaza ceasefire cannot be understood as an isolated event but as a symptom of a broader paradigm. In the emerging regional order, sovereignty is no longer measured by diplomatic recognition but by the effective capacity to resist and deter. Palestine stands as the ethical and political limit of the international system: a people without a state, yet not without will; without a regular army, yet with a symbolic power of resistance that unsettles the narrative of imposed peace.

Each failed truce confirms that peace without equality is impossible. Israeli ceasefires function as conceptual devices designed to sustain war under the guise of peace —a formula exported and adapted to other arenas, from Lebanon to Syria, where the management of violence replaces political resolution.
Against this backdrop, Palestinian resistance —in all its forms— endures as the ultimate assertion of dignity. To resist is not merely to oppose the occupier; it is to insist on the right to exist, to decide, and to imagine a future beyond the order imposed by force and the world’s complicit silence.