5 reasons to keep our eyes on Palestine.
Palestinians inspect their destroyed homes following Israeli airstrikes targeted a residential block in Al Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, October 29, 2025. Yousef Zaanoun
A ceasefire went into effect in Gaza one month ago yesterday. A lot has happened in the four weeks since. Today, you’d be hard pressed to find Palestine in the news.
Zohran Mamdani electrified the country and made headlines with his election as mayor of New York City. Yesterday marked day 41 of the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history. Tens of millions of people relying on SNAP benefits are in limbo. The Senate voted to end the shutdown, but left access to healthcare for millions hanging in uncertainly.
While holding all of this — and more — it remains critical to keep our eyes on Palestine. Here are five reasons why.
1. Nearly 900 Palestinians have been killed or wounded since October 11, when the ceasefire went into effect.
The Israeli government has violated the ceasefire deal nearly 300 times since it went into effect in October, bombing Gaza over 100 times and carrying out near-daily attacks that have killed at least 242 Palestinians and injured over 600 others.
On only six of the last 31 days did Israel not attack, kill, or injure Palestinians in Gaza.
2. As a full-blown famine rages, Israel continues to block life-saving aid from reaching Palestinians.
Only half of the needed food aid is reaching Gaza, the World Food Programme has warned — an average of less than 200 trucks daily, far below the 600 trucks stipulated by the ceasefire agreement.
No direct deliveries of aid have entered Gaza’s devastated north in 75 days. The Rafah border crossing, Gaza’s main lifeline, remains closed. Israeli restrictions continue to block most international organizations from delivering aid in Gaza.
Now, the U.S. government is reportedly being charged with feeding Palestinians in Gaza. How this will work — or whether it will lead to more aid being allowed into Gaza — remains unclear. The Israeli government continues to assert that aid will be delivered “solely by [Israeli] approved international organizations.”
3. The World Bank says rebuilding Gaza will cost $70 billion, and it’s already endorsed U.S. plans for an international body to oversee reconstruction.
A U.S.-drafted U.N. Security Council Resolution, still under negotiation, would see the establishment in Gaza of a two-year transitional governing body, the so-called “Board of Peace,” as well as an “international stabilization force.”
As the Wire argued last month, the ceasefire deal is designed to deny Palestinians self-determination. Now that the World Bank has endorsed Trump’s plan, we can expect reconstruction focused on opening Gaza to American business interests — and laying the groundwork for attacks on the sovereignty of any future elected Palestinian government.
4. Imperial violence inevitably finds its way back home.
What’s happening in Palestine has a direct impact on the rights of people here in the U.S. The U.S.-backed, Israeli genocide in Gaza has made a mockery of international law, deepened the crisis of legitimacy for international institutions like the U.N., and laid the groundwork for an expansion of right-wing populism across the globe, empowering the Trump regime to be bolder than ever in its attacks on human rights here at home.
This is the “imperial boomerang” in action: Political conditions inside the United States are shaped by imperial violence abroad. The weapons, technology, and tactics used to surveil, displace, and kill Palestinians in Palestine will inevitably be used by the country supplying them to silence dissent at home.
That’s exactly what we’ve seen: from the deployment of military-grade drones to surveil student activists, to the use of counterterrorism laws — originally conceived to target Palestinians — against Stop Cop City protesters, to the weaponization of “antisemitism” accusations to crush pro-Palestine speech, to ICE gaining access to Israeli-made spyware that can hack phones and encrypted apps.
It’s not just a matter of our oppressors being the same. Project Esther shows how the Trump administration is testing and honing its authoritarian tactics specifically on activists organizing in solidarity with Palestine — and their goal is to expand the crackdown to all of civil society. That means anyone who cares about protecting civil liberties in this country should care about Palestine.
5. The ceasefire did not end Israel’s genocide of Palestinians; it marked a new phase of the genocide.
Israel continues to kill Palestinians with impunity in Gaza and across historic Palestine. In the last weeks, Israeli troops have carried out raids across the Occupied West Bank and settler violence has surged to record levels, with more attacks carried out in October than in any month since the UN began keeping track in 2006.
Israeli attacks on the West Bank have been on the rise since October 2023: A whopping 43% of all Palestinians killed in the West Bank over the past 20 years were killed in the last year. The end goal of this violence is always maximum land, minimum Palestinians: In July, the Wire covered massive Israeli raids across the West Bank that displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes — ethnic cleansing on a scale not seen since 1967.
The Israeli military still controls over half of Gaza. In the days after the ceasefire agreement went into effect, Israeli forces began placing yellow concrete blocks to demarcate the “yellow line”: where Israeli troops were forced to withdraw as part of the first phase of the deal. Now, the Israeli military is systematically demolishing homes inside the yellow line and building new military infrastructure, including a fortified outpost that Israeli forces took journalists on a tour of last week. That has raised concerns among Western officials involved with the implementation of the next phases of the ceasefire deal that the yellow line risks becoming a de facto border that would “indefinitely” divide Gaza.
All the while, Israel continues to bomb Lebanon with impunity, carrying out near-daily attacks in violation of another, year-old ceasefire with Hezbollah: an omen of what life could look like in Gaza a year from now should the Israeli government be allowed to use the “ceasefire” as cover to continue its genocide.
It should come as no surprise that the Trump regime remains determined to sell its ceasefire deal. The White House has claimed without evidence that the food aid entering Gaza meets the minimum threshold set by the ceasefire, even as Palestinians continue to starve. When Israel launched airstrikes that killed dozens of Palestinians in a single day — and then turned around 10 days later and did it again — Trump insisted that the ceasefire remained in place.
Though it brought temporary relief for many across Gaza, Trump’s ceasefire deal was always intended to allow Israel to continue to kill and dispossess Palestinians with impunity. It paves the way for Trump to remake the Middle East in his image: starting with the expansion of normalization deals between Israel and Arab states, wherein Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is fully integrated into a new regional order designed to maintain Israeli occupation and apartheid. Far from ending the genocide, the ceasefire has left Gaza’s future hanging in the balance and given Israel cover to escalate its attacks on Palestinians across historic Palestine, making the work of our movements as urgent as ever.
Take action: Defend students under attack.
At CU Boulder, students peacefully protesting weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin’s complicity in Israeli genocide were slapped with interim sanctions, including suspensions. Some lost their housing as a result.
Email CU Boulder administrators now to demand that these students be cleared of these trumped-up charges — and to call on them to uphold the rights to free speech and political protest.
Take action: Block the Bombs.
Using the action tool provided by our sister organization, JVP Action, we’ve already sent over 36,000 emails to our members of Congress demanding they support the historic Block the Bombs Act.
Let’s reach 50,000 emails this week. Write your member of Congress now and tell them to stop arming Israel’s ongoing genocide.
What we’re listening to: JVP Radio.
On the brand new podcast JVP Radio, our members and our partners in the movement tell our stories on our own terms.
Listen to our latest episode, out now: “Building a movement from the base up.”
What we’re reading: Discriminating against dissent.
The Middle East Studies Association and the American Association of University Professors have published a groundbreaking new report on the abuse of Title VI antisemitism complaints to attack the Palestine solidarity movement.
More Title VI “antisemitism” investigations were opened in the last two months of 2023 than in all previous years combined — and at least 79% of the complaints analyzed involve criticism of Israel or Zionism, not Jews or Judaism.
Ms. Rachel calls out anti-Palestinian bias at the NY Times.
Children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel, who has over 4 million followers on Instagram, called out the New York Times for its biased coverage of the Gaza genocide.
She announced in a separate post that she was unsubscribing from the paper because of its “biased and dehumanizing coverage of Palestinians and Palestine.”
With nearly 100,000 subscribers, the Wire is one of the largest American publications dedicated to justice. Every week, we cover important news from Palestine, the United States, and the Palestine solidarity movement — and provide ways to take action.
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With nearly 100,000 subscribers, the Wire is one of the largest American publications dedicated to justice. Every week, we cover important news from Palestine, the United States, and the Palestine solidarity movement — and provide ways to take action.