As senior officials from Donald Trump’s US administration travel to Israel to try to save the ceasefire in Gaza, the extent of the ongoing violence by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) is becoming clear. Israel has violated the 10-day-old ceasefire at least 80 times, killing at least 97 Palestinians and wounding 230 more, according to the Gaza Government Media Office.
Two Israeli soldiers have also been killed, with Israel accusing Hamas of also violating the truce. The group has done so, despite its denials, though the presence of Israeli-backed Palestinian militia groups in Gaza makes it hard to know who is responsible for which violation.
Meanwhile, 10,800 Palestinians, including 450 children, are still being detained in Israel – around a third of whom are being held without trial. Israel is also still refusing to open the key border crossing from Rafah to Egypt and paused crucial aid deliveries into Gaza on Sunday 19 October over an alleged Hamas ceasefire violation (some crossings were reportedly reopened to aid convoys at around midday local time on Monday).
It is just about possible that the ceasefire will survive, but Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and those around him clearly do not want it to. Whether they succeed in ending it will depend on how far the Trump administration is prepared to go to force them to honour it, which in turn relates to the mood back home.
Public support for Israel in the US has declined since the start of its genocide in Gaza, but remains strong among some demographics – particularly Evangelical Christians. That group numbers close to a third of the US population, is more likely to vote than the average American and tends to vote Republican – and includes tens of millions of convinced Christian Zionists who are resolute supporters of Israel.
Still, though, international support for Palestinians – including in the US – has increased over the past two years. Israeli violence has so far killed almost 70,000 people, including 20,000 children, with many thousands more missing and presumed dead under the rubble of wrecked buildings. That support is likely to persist as more information becomes available about the destruction of Gaza, where the damage takes many forms.
One core concern is the water crisis, with Israel’s Arava Institute for Environmental Studies reporting that 300 wells in Gaza City alone have been damaged or are inaccessible, and many desalination plants are inoperable or running at less than half their total capacity. Consequently, the amount of daily water available to each person is down to barely half of the World Health Organisation’s emergency minimum.
To make matters worse, the IDF destroyed Gaza’s sewage treatment plants after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, meaning that its sewage has been diverted into lagoons over the past two years, with some of it seeping into the groundwater, increasing the risk of water-borne disease spread.
And while Gaza’s pre-2023 croplands may have been small, they were highly productive and much valued, especially with vegetable and fruit crops grown intensively under glass. After all, Gaza is at the southern end of the ‘fertile crescent’ of biblical times. Arava estimates 80% of these croplands have been damaged or destroyed in the past two years, and more than 80% of the tree cover has been lost.
Under the ceasefire deal, Israel should release some of the thousands of Palestinians still detained without trial, who are increasingly seen as hostages, in the coming weeks, as well as the bodies of those who have died while being held without trial. Their release will also shed more light on Israeli actions, with the conditions of the 90 bodies already returned to Gaza supporting reports that the IDF is torturing and murdering prisoners. Most had been executed, with many showing signs of having been bound and blindfolded, and having gunshot wounds between the eyes. Some appeared to have been beaten before death, while others showed signs of abuse after death.
One result of the treatment of these prisoners and Israel’s lack of any attempt to hide the evidence will be to instil fear in other Palestinians as to their likely fate if they are captured by the IDF.
As more information about Israeli violence becomes available, international support for Palestine is highly likely to persist. This has been the trend of the past two years; in the UK, for example, there have been 32 mass demonstrations in London over that period, repeatedly bringing together well over a hundred thousand people. The most recent was just ten days ago, when half a million people gathered in the capital. Most of the demonstrations have been ignored by the UK’s right-wing legacy media, but they are indicative of a public mood that shows every sign of persisting.
This pattern also stretches far beyond Britain, with similar mass demonstrations taking place around the globe. In Europe, some of the protests have been huge; two weeks ago, two million people rallied across Italy as part of a one-day general strike to support Gaza, and 100,000 people attended demonstrations in the Spanish cities of Madrid and Barcelona. Further demonstrations took place in Portugal, France and Greece.
While these widespread and sustained protests may have little if any direct impact on the Israeli government, they are creating considerable political at ease in many of the countries where they are taking place. This can be seen through the increasing legal constraints on the right to protest as counter-terror laws are weaponised against peaceful protesters.
The West has seen “a worrying shift towards the normalisation of exceptional measures in dealing with dissenting voices” over the past two years, according to a new study by the International Federation for Human Rights that focused on the UK, the US, France and Germany.
These efforts to curb dissent betray politicians’ unease at their loss of control of political narratives. That is a distinctly uncomfortable position for them to be in, and will be reflected in considerable private pressure on the White House to bring the Israeli assault on Gaza to an end.
A full understanding of the impact of civil protest on the Gaza conflict may take years to assess, but the early signs are that this will be seen as the strongest example of transnational nonviolent public action in decades.
Source: Open Democracy