Ceasefire does not mean return to business as usual

Dear Comrades,

A ceasefire in Gaza—it’s a word whispered with cautious hope, yet heavy with the weight of past betrayals. Announced on Wednesday, Jan 15, but not to be implemented until Sunday, this pause in carnage feels distant, precarious, and incomplete. As we wait, the massacres in Gaza continue. Families who celebrated the ceasefire were murdered, unable to witness it. The earth there is heavy with destruction, the skies carry the echoes of explosions, and the nights are illuminated by fire instead of stars.

The agreement, which Netanyahu rejected in July last year, after rejecting 11 other ceasefire deals, unfolds in three pivotal stages, each spanning 42 days:

Stage 1: Immediate Measures

• Cessation of Hostilities: Both parties will suspend military operations. zionist forces are to withdraw from populated areas, retreating 700 meters eastward from the border, including regions like Wadi Gaza.
• Airspace Regulations: Zionist forces and reconnaissance flights over Gaza will be paused for 10 hours daily, extending to 12 hours on days designated for prisoner exchanges.
• Prisoner Releases: the zionist entity commits to releasing approximately 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including 250 serving life sentences and around 1,000 detained post-October 7, 2023.
• Return of Displaced Persons: Following the release of seven zionist detainees, zionist forces will withdraw from key areas, facilitating the return of displaced Palestinians and ensuring unimpeded civilian movement across Gaza.
• Humanitarian Aid: The Rafah Crossing will open seven days into Stage 1, allowing the daily entry of 600 trucks laden with humanitarian aid, relief supplies, and fuel, with half directed to northern Gaza.

Stage 2: Consolidation of Calm

• Further Prisoner Exchanges: Hamas will release all remaining living zionist detainees, including civilians and soldiers, in exchange for an agreed number of Palestinian prisoners.
• Zionist Military Withdrawal: the zionist entity will complete its withdrawal from remaining areas in Gaza, dismantling military installations and ensuring the return of displaced persons.
• Humanitarian Efforts: Continued and enhanced delivery of humanitarian aid, focusing on rebuilding infrastructure and providing essential services to the people of Gaza.

Stage 3: Reconstruction and Long-Term Stability

• Exchange of Remains: Both parties will exchange the bodies and remains of deceased individuals after identification.
• Reconstruction Initiatives: A comprehensive plan for rebuilding Gaza over three to five years will commence, focusing on homes, civilian facilities, and infrastructure, with oversight from Egypt, Qatar, and the United Nations.
• Lifting of the Blockade: the zionist entity will end the blockade on Gaza, facilitating economic recovery and freedom of movement for Palestinians.

Even if the ceasefire comes, we must ask ourselves: what happens next? Ceasefire or not, there is no pause button for the enduring toll of decades of settler-colonial violence. Gaza is suffocating, not only under rubble but under the weight of a complicit international community that greenlighted the massacres.

In the shadow of destruction, Palestinians are showing us what radical hope looks like—but hope alone is not justice. Justice cannot come through tentative pauses or rhetorical gestures; it demands an end to the root cause of their suffering: the relentless machinery of zionist settler colonialism. This machinery is fed fuel from every corner in the world through military companies, aid, trade, and research with the zionist entity.

Let us also not forget that ceasefires, as history reminds us, are fragile. Violations have become the norm, and “truces” often serve as mere intermissions for the settler state to recalibrate its violence. A ceasefire, if it holds, will not rebuild Gaza’s hospitals, restore its schools, or unpollute its water. It will not undo the mass displacement or bring back the lives lost in relentless bombing campaigns. Ceasefire or not, Gaza will still be an open wound on the conscience of the world.

And the violence extends beyond Gaza. In Jenin, Palestinians are under siege by the Palestinian Authority doing the bidding for the zionist entity. Settlers continue to destroy homes and uproot olive trees, zionist forces arrest and detain children, and entire villages are wiped off maps as though they never existed. This is not a “conflict.” It is a systematic erasure of a people televised worldwide.

What do we do in the face of this? We act.

We support Palestinians in ways that matter—in material, principled, and urgent ways. We cannot simply bear witness to their suffering; we must stand in solidarity with their resistance. Their fight for freedom is not abstract. It is not a debate. It is a demand for survival, dignity, and liberation.

Here is what we can do:

• Provide Material Support: Donate to trusted Palestinian-led organizations offering aid, rebuilding homes, and ensuring access to food, medicine, and clean water. The Good Shepherd Collective has been supporting Gaza Funds, Workshops 4 Gaza, and the Sameer Project as well as GoFundMe pages of people in Gaza. We’ve asked that during this time, the broader movement steer funds from supporting NGOs and invest first and foremost in the people of Gaza.
• Raise Awareness: Share critical voices of the empire and capitalism, forge relationships across regions built on decolonial praxis, and expose the liberal NGO industrial complex that grifted off the Gaza genocide.
• Push for Accountability: Expose governments, institutions, and corporations complicit in funding and enabling this genocide. No calm and peace for those who enabled this genocide.

Palestinians have no choice but to endure and resist. We, however, have the choice to act along them—or to remain complicitly silent. In this moment, let us choose solidarity. Let us choose action. Ceasefire or not, the work for liberation continues.

With hope and determination,
Bana Abu Zuluf

Host a discussion with the Good Shepherd Collective

Members of the Good Shepherd Collective are coming to Chicago at the end of May this year. We’re looking to organize a few discussions within the local activist communities. If you’re interested in hosting a discussion or meeting up, please send us an email at bana@goodshepherdcollective.org so we get organized!