On Monday, 15 October 2025, a ceasefire deal was signed between Hamas and Israel. At the time, it appeared that the truce would put an end to 900kg bombs being dropped on the children and hospitals of Gaza.
For a second, we could hope. Perhaps even celebrate. However, I started writing this on 16 October and as of that date, Israel had killed at least 23 Palestinians (all since the start of the ceasefire). But at that point, there were no bombs.
It is now 20 October, and as I write, Israel has resumed its bombing, while the number of Palestinians killed by Israel has risen to 51. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning Palestinian writer and poet Abu Toha recently put it, all that a ceasefire deal with Israel means is that “you cease, we fire”.
At moments like this, I often turn to the online satirical magazine The Onion. In possibly its most apt and prescient headline to date, it wrote “Israel Agrees To Go Back To Killing Palestinians On Less Frequent Basis”.
Of course, any ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza is innately asymmetric given that Israel holds two million people in an open-air prison (Gaza), controlling all access to and from the territory, while also controlling the entry of all food and water.
Flouting of ceasefire no surprise
But, given the pre-ordained impunity that Israel appears to believe comes with simply being Israel, the routine flouting of the ceasefire comes as no surprise.
In this belief, they have President Trump as a reliable ally. Two days after the signing of the ceasefire deal, Trump stated that “he would consider allowing” Benjamin Netanyahu to resume military action in Gaza if Hamas did not “uphold its end of the ceasefire deal”. He said Israeli forces could return to the streets “as soon as I say the word”.
I am going to attempt a two-pronged exploration of what this ceasefire deal might signify. The first will be the extent to which the deal is patronising and paternalistic, while the second is how a potential real estate deal perfectly encapsulates our dystopian post-capitalist moment.
Listening to Trump at the signing of the ceasefire deal, it felt like I was listening to a deeply patriarchal and authoritarian father speaking about his children: “My children are mine, they belong to me, I am the head of the household, and I decide what they do, and what they think” – there is no other word but mine. But of course, many of even the most authoritarian and abominable fathers do in fact love their children. For Trump, Palestinians are non-human, and we have moved beyond being patronising or paternalistic.
Colonial violence
In this regard, and to move further away from a potential paternalistic argument, I want to draw on the work of the noted Palestinian feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.
She has argued powerfully that Israel rejects even the notion of a Palestinian child. For her, Israel refuses to see Palestinian children as children, seeing them rather as “dangerous entities”, and describes this as a process of “unchilding” or the “authorised eviction of children from childhood”.
When, in October 2023, the Israeli liberal centrist politician Meirav Ben-Ari stated “the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves”, she was epitomising the argument that Shalhoub-Kevorkian is making.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian has also described how the Israeli state functions on “an industry of killability of the unwanted and unregistered, of the already-dead”. Settler colonialism has always wrought its horror on the bodies of the colonised. Settler colonialism has always silenced the voice of the colonised. Trump is not being paternalistic, or patronising, or talking down to “his children”. Rather, he is engaging in the purest form of colonial violence.
Genocide birthing a real estate opportunity
And what of genocide as real estate opportunity? At the signing of the ceasefire deal in the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on 15 October, Trump rambled to 16 world leaders about the “glimmering” new investment opportunities for Gaza.
In the run-up to the ceasefire deal, the New York Times reported that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was receiving calls about a potential prisoner swap while sitting in his mansion on a man-made island just north of Miami. He then drove 20 minutes to another mansion belonging to another billionaire, Steve Witkoff, who happens to be Trump’s Middle East peace envoy, to iron out the details of the deal.
Kushner is, of course, the architect of a plan to turn Gaza into a glitzy waterfront with himself and his father-in-law as key financiers and partners. And then, on Monday, 20 October, when the Israeli bombs began to fall again, The Guardian reported that Kushner and Witkoff were on their way to Israel to oversee the fragile ceasefire agreement.
In the past, ceasefire deals attempted a veneer of political legitimacy, even if one side was actually “calling the shots”. The current ceasefire deal attempts none of this. Jared Kushner, the unelected owner of a private equity firm (Affinity Partners), is overseeing a political ceasefire deal for a territory he wants to buy? It would almost be funny, were it not so utterly grotesque.
This is not a ceasefire agreement. It is genocide birthing a real estate deal. In the 1980s, Trump used to cut the heat and hot water of elderly tenants in New York to drive them out of rent-controlled apartments so he could demolish them and build luxury apartments. Now Trump relies on Israel and Netanyahu to do his evicting for him.
While Trump rambles and Kushner signs real estate deals, the homes of two million people have been turned into rubble, 10,000 Palestinian bodies remain under 60 million tons of rubble (the volume of rubble in the Gaza Strip is 14 times greater than the combined total from all conflicts over the past 16 years), and one of the oldest urban centres in the world (Gaza City) lies in ruin.
The ceasefire deal was never about fairness, international law or justice.
Perhaps we should be grateful that nobody is pretending any more, allowing us to see what is happening for the abomination it is – two of the most appalling human beings to have ever lived (Trump and Netanyahu), overseeing a genocide, while at the same time planning the building of gold-plated hotels on the graves and bodies of generations of Palestinian children.
Fiction writers out there. Better that if you can. DM