The war in Gaza has finally ended. For peace to last, the international community, especially the Global South, must ensure that the ceasefire leads to a genuine political settlement between Palestinians and Israelis, and that those responsible for war crimes are brought to justice. Without these, death and destruction will inevitably resume sooner or later.
The two-year Israeli war on Gaza and its two million people, following Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, has been brutal by every definition. NGOs, international experts, and UN bodies have accused Israel of committing genocide and using starvation as a weapon, allegedly to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian population to make way for settlement. Indeed, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the world’s top court, ruled early in the war (January 2024) that Israel’s actions in Gaza could plausibly amount to genocide and ordered urgent measures to prevent it. Yet, the destruction and starvation of Palestinians went unchecked for another 21 months!
The numbers speak for themselves: 67,000 Palestinians have been confirmed killed, 18,000 of them children, with total deaths, direct and indirect, estimated at 186,000. Ninety-two per cent of Gaza’s homes have been destroyed, 1.9 million people displaced, and 99 per cent of households left food insecure. In this time, 270 journalists were killed, 518 schools destroyed or damaged, and 790 attacks carried out on doctors and healthcare workers.
A horizon for lasting peace?
Without diminishing the significance of the cessation of violence, which is finally allowing aid into a starved Gaza and letting Palestinians return to what is left of their bombed-out homes, the question that is on everyone’s mind is whether the ceasefire, is just a pause, or it will pave the way forward for a political settlement, that will permanently end a return to violence.
At the heart of this 75-year-old conflict lies the question of Palestinian self-determination—specifically, the demand for an independent and sovereign State of Palestine, an end to Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and the right of return for refugees. These demands have been upheld by numerous UN resolutions, most recently in December 2024 and reaffirmed by the General Assembly in September 2025, endorsing, with an overwhelming majority, the New York Declaration on the two-state solution, of a peaceful settlement between Israel and Palestine.
It is Israel’s denial of these lawful demands of Palestinians and the collective will of the international community that has perpetuated the conflict, bringing devastation to Palestinians and denying Israelis the peace they too deserve.
Trump’s 20-Point Gaza Peace Plan, credited with facilitating the ceasefire, is notably thin on detail. It is particularly slim on any long-term horizon, beyond the immediate. Point 20 of the plan commits the US to “establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous co-existence”, without acknowledging the failures of previous US and Western-led efforts.
Only point 19 mentions Palestinian self-determination and statehood, but as an aspirational pathway, conditioned on “the PA (Palestinian Authority) reform programme (being) faithfully carried out”, linking self-determination of occupied Palestinians to the performance of the PA, and a Western assessment of its reform!
To avoid a return to war, peace brokers must ensure that the first phase of the plan — ending Israeli operations, withdrawing troops, and exchanging detainees and prisoners — holds, and that a political settlement is actively pursued.
A history of dashed Palestinian struggles
Palestinians have, since the creation of Israel in 1948, and especially since the Israeli occupation of their lands in 1967, tried everything to seek independence, including armed struggle, their right in international law, as an occupied people. As the Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi catalogues, the long history of Palestinian struggle is a testament to that steadfastness.
In 2018–19, Palestinians peacefully protested against the Gaza blockade and for their right to return, which became known as the Great March of Return. Gaza has been under Israeli blockade since 2006, strangling its economy and turning it into an “open-air prison.” Seventy per cent of Gazans are refugees or descendants of those expelled in the 1948 Nakba.
The Great March saw men, women, and children march to border fences weekly for months, demanding freedom. They were met with deadly force. A UN inquiry found Israeli soldiers killed at least 189 civilians, including minors and the disabled—171 shot in the head or torso—and injured over 8,000 with live ammunition.
The Great March followed a history of brutal Israeli violence against Palestinians, among the harshest being its successful repression of the First Intifada (1987–1990), the mass civil resistance by Palestinians that began in 1987 in Gaza, but that Israel successfully crushed by 1990. The ‘peace process’ that ensued delivered little for Palestinians – the Oslo Peace Accords (1993), Camp David Summit (2000) or Arab Peace Initiative (2002), among others.
Ostensibly, Israeli military operations against Palestinians or their reluctance to peace talks are in reaction to the latter’s terrorism. In reality, it is the Israeli unwillingness to Palestinian self-determination that drives the calculus. As one Israeli negotiator admitted after the 2005 Gaza withdrawal, the goal was to “freeze the political process” and thus “prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
The blockade of Gaza that came with the Israeli pull-out in 2005 also meant the throttling of its economy and society that the Great March sought to undo.
In 2006, frustrated by PA corruption and fruitless negotiations, Palestinians elected Hamas in a vote deemed free and fair by independent observers. Israel responded by tightening its siege; the United States and European Union followed with sanctions. UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard condemned this as collective punishment of an occupied population, while Israel faced no accountability for its violations.
The West demanded Hamas renounce violence and recognise Israel, along with prior Israel-Palestine agreements, including the Oslo Accord, which also legitimised Israeli occupation and settlements in the West Bank. But that demand was unilateral: Israel was not asked to renounce violence and reciprocally recognise the Palestinian right to statehood.
We find echoes of the same one-rule-for-Palestinians-another-for-Israelis in Trump’s “peace” plan.
The very first point demands deradicalisation of Gaza to a ‘terror-free zone’, without making similar demands on the Israeli state and society, becoming increasingly extremist, and war-hungry.
The plan also seeks demilitarisation of armed Palestinian groups, so they do not pose a threat to neighbours, without any reciprocal conditions on Israel, which is recognised today as undermining Palestinian rights, also the biggest threat to peace in the region.
Ultimately, while the consensus in Israel today is to deny Palestinian statehood, the peace plan promises little on it.
Without a political settlement founded on international law and UN resolutions, the peace plan is bound to be a non-starter, a ceasefire remaining at best, a pause in violence, before the inevitable next round of death and destruction.
The Imperative of Accountability
Western, especially US, support for Israel also encourages Israel to carry on wreaking violence against Gaza, and indeed the West Bank, without any thought to consequences. And that takes us to the point about failed accountability for Israeli crimes against Palestinians through the years, something that the peace plan completely ignores.
The two-year war was only the latest of Israel’s assaults on the strip. Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein shows how Israel, every few years, brings murder and destruction at industrial scale on Gaza, in military operations that Israeli leaders sadistically describe as “mowing the lawn”: Operation Rainbow (2004: 59 dead, incl. 18 minors), Operation Day of Penitence (2004: 107 dead), Operation Summer Rain (2006: 184 dead), Operations Autumn Clouds (2006: 50 dead) and Operations Hot winter (2008: 107 dead).
With every successive operation, Israel has been further emboldened. Operation Cast Lead in 2008 resulted in an estimated 1400 Palestinians killed, some 300 of them children. A UN fact-finding mission on atrocities then (Goldstone Report), accused Israel of committing war crimes through deliberate attacks on civilians and the use of disproportionate force, concluding that the Israeli objective in the war seemed to have been to “punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population.”
Operation Protective Edge, in 2014, was a repeat, on a greater scale (1462 deaths, including 551 children). Then UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, said on his visit to Gaza at its end, “The destruction I have seen here is beyond description”, ascribed by a UN fact-finding mission to Israel’s use of artillery and air strikes, in densely populated areas.
Despite repeated UN investigations and global outrage, no Israeli leaders or soldiers have faced consequences—thanks to the shield of Western protection. This impunity directly paved the way for the 2023–25 genocide in Gaza.
If we wish to prevent another atrocity, there must be accountability this time.
With the International Criminal Court having issued arrest warrants against Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, and former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, in November 2024, alleging their responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including use of starvation and intentional targeting of civilians, it is incumbent on all signatories to the Rome Statute (1998), to apprehend the two, should they land in their territory.
Additionally, with the International Court of Justice having ruled, in January 2024, that it was plausible that Israel’s actions in Gaza could amount to genocide, and the UN Commission of Inquiry on Gaza concluding in September 2025, that Israel had in fact, committed and continued to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, it is incumbent on the international community, to prevent and punish genocide, even extraterritorially, including through arrests, sanctions and cutting military and business ties with Israel. The obligation is universally binding on all states.
The obligation applies to India, among the first to ratify the Genocide Convention,1948. Yet, in September 2025, the Modi government welcomed, amid the genocide underway, the Israeli Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a messianic settler and leader of the far-right Religious Zionism party, sanctioned by the UK and several Western nations in June 2025, for inciting violence and settler displacement of Palestinians. This disregard for international law and morality does India no good.
There is another reason why accountability for crimes in Gaza is so important.
If Israeli politicians and security force personnel are allowed to go scot-free after committing atrocities and genocide in Gaza, that they have, among the worst in recent memory, that will signal to all genocidaires around the world that there will be no consequences for them, for their actions. That is not a world we would want our children to grow up in, and we must do all we can to prevent it.
Sajjad Hassan is a researcher on conflicts and human rights.
