Could silence be mistaken for peace? The Grammar of accountability in Gaza

The announcement of the Gaza ceasefire on 9 October 2025 followed months of US-brokered negotiations between Israel and Hamas, culminating in a “first-phase” agreement mediated by Qatar and Egypt and endorsed by the United Nations. Under the terms publicly outlined, Israel agreed to withdraw its forces from central and southern Gaza in stages, permit the return of displaced civilians to the north, and increase humanitarian aid deliveries through the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings, while Hamas committed to the release of remaining Israeli hostages in exchange for the phased liberation of Palestinian prisoners. Nevertheless, despite its scope, the ceasefire has elicited cautious acknowledgement rather than relief among humanitarian agencies and local residents, as more than 1.9 million Gazans remain displaced and critical infrastructure destruction has rendered large parts of the Strip uninhabitable even amid the truce.  The agreement’s structure, described diplomatically as a “first phase” pending further political negotiations, reproduces the same asymmetry that has governed Gaza for decades, prioritizing security arrangements and controlled aid flows over political restitution or accountability for alleged war crimes. 

 International humanitarian law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, clearly prohibits collective punishment, the targeting of civilians, and the destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure. Furthermore, collective punishment is expressly forbidden under Geneva Convention IV, Article 33. Consequently, intentionally directing attacks at civilians or civilian objects (including medical facilities) is a war crime under Rome Statute Article 8 and customary IHL.  Yet enforcement remains absent, and violations have persisted since October  2023, under the vocabulary of “self-defence” and “security.” At the same time, the International Court of Justice, in its provisional measures order of January 2024, ordered Israel to take steps to prevent acts under the Genocide Convention and to enable humanitarian assistance separately, while urging that all States Parties carry a duty under the Genocide Convention to prevent genocide. That these findings produced no substantive shift in policy exposes a crisis of compliance and belief in the relevance of law itself, highlighting that the foundations of the modern international legal order were shaped by imperial and colonial encounters, producing a system that presents itself as universal, yet was historically structured to govern and discipline non-European societies. In Gaza, this legacy endures. Law becomes an instrument for administering subjugation instead of dismantling it.

For many Gazans confronting the daily realities of displacement, famine and destroyed housing, the ceasefire represents a temporary suspension of violence instead of a meaningful transformation, or simply a fragile pause within a continuing regime of deprivation. Empirical data makes what was once abstract brutally concrete with about 90% of Gaza’s population having been displaced, and over 82% of the territory has been under evacuation orders and/or within militarized zones. Critical infrastructure has been devastated, with direct physical damage estimated at approximately USD 30 billion in a joint World Bank–UN interim damage assessment covering damage up to February 2025 and more than half a million people in Gaza were classified as experiencing famine in August 2025. Genocide, therefore, is not limited to the act of killing and should not be interpreted only as such. For the past two years, it has encompassed the systematic destruction of the social, cultural, and material foundations that allow a community to exist. Viewed through this lens, the devastation in Gaza represents a sustained assault on the conditions that sustain collective life, on infrastructure, health systems, and the social networks that make recovery possible. A ceasefire that leaves these structures in ruin instead of ending the process simply alters its tempo.

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Humanitarian discourse, meanwhile, is now called to fill the void left by political paralysis. Aid deliveries and medical interventions become forms of moral compensation, offering care without confronting the political conditions that necessitate it. We see it as before, empathy substitutes for justice, and relief becomes a way to normalize structural harm, while leaving its structural causes untouched. In Gaza, this dynamic is especially stark. The humanitarian frame allows international actors to appear engaged while avoiding confrontation with the political reality of occupation and apartheid. Palestinians are recognized as victims in need of relief instead of political subjects with agency, entitled to sovereignty and the result is what one might call administrative empathy. 

Indeed, the physical violence may slow, but the conditions that make it possible remain intact, the siege, the dispossession, the systematic denial of life’s essentials. The question, then, is not whether genocide has ceased, but whether it can ever “end” while its architecture of domination stands unbroken. The structures of power governing Gaza reveal a regime in which the capacity to decide who may live and who must die is exercised through blockade and bombardment. The territory has been transformed into an uninhabitable, managed space, where life is maintained only at the edge of extinction.  And as it seems, the law functions as intended by legitimizing hierarchy, naming domination as order, and rendering resistance a form of criminality.

The international community’s response reveals a deeper disorder with the disintegration of the idea of law as a restraint on power. The ICJ’s finding of plausible rights at risk under the Genocide Convention and the resulting provisional measures produced statements of “concern,” but not sanctions; humanitarian airdrops coexisted with continued arms transfers by some states. It is clear that the Genocide Convention requires states not only to refrain from participation but to prevent such acts. Therefore, this selective application of law undermines the very notion of a rules-based order and confirms what post-colonial theorists have long argued: that legality has always been differentially distributed, extended to some and suspended for others- and the Gaza case makes visible this asymmetry in its most brutal form.

The repeated invocation of “peace process” and “de-escalation” obscures the reality that peace, as conventionally framed, has long been a managerial concept rather than a transformative one. The Oslo paradigm institutionalized an indefinite interim-administered peace without liberation. The current ceasefire risks doing the same, presenting the suspension of violence as a solution while leaving the underlying system of domination untouched. Peace that is detached from justice risks reproducing domination under another name. Any genuine cessation of violence must therefore move beyond the management of conflict toward its transformation, the restoration of sovereignty, the pursuit of accountability for systemic crimes, the dismantling of apartheid structures, and the affirmation of Palestinian self-determination as a non-negotiable political and legal principle.

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