When the day comes, where and in what state will we be?

Almost every ceasefire agreement Israel has signed to date follows a by now thoroughly familiar routine, a standard format of the agreements: The agreement is signed, international public opinion breathes a sigh of relief, the mediators announce their diplomatic success, and then Israel soon, even at the very moment the agreement is signed, begins to violate both the spirit and the provisions of the agreement. Because for Israel a ceasefire has never been a road to peace. A ceasefire is nothing but a tactical interlude that temporarily eases international pressure, allows it to reorganize its army, set new military objectives and prepare for the next wave of attacks.

What is happening in Gaza today is a new example of this.

Israel's marked intensification of its attacks right after Hamas announced that advanced understandings had been reached with the mediators and the relevant parties, the US administration included, on implementing the second phase of the ceasefire agreement comes into play as part of this routine. This is a new link in a policy Israel has been repeating for years, and which it actually pursues thanks to unlimited US support and to the Arab-Islamic world's excessively unlimited patience and silence: producing new facts on the ground while negotiating at the table.

The Palestinian Diplomacy Center's field report for the period 30 July-2 August lays out this reality in numbers. In four days, 34 Palestinians were killed and 121 were wounded. Among the dead are children, women and the elderly. The number of Palestinians killed since the ceasefire has reached 1,248, and the number of wounded 4,111. In the same four days, 87 separate ceasefire violations were recorded; 52 of them were air and artillery bombardments and 29 were cases of direct shooting. On 2 August alone, 20 bombardments were carried out.

This picture is still called a ceasefire. Of course, when we recall that the US and Israel were far more eager and willing for this ceasefire at the outset, it is impossible not to see that Hamas and the Palestinian people are fighting their real great battles during the ceasefire rather than during the clashes. For Israel, the ceasefire is merely a flexible operational process in which it adjusts the intensity of bombardment according to its own military calculations.

Of course, Israel's violations are not limited to bombs. Hunger is also today one of the most effective weapons of war. Under the provisions of the ceasefire, 2,400 aid and commercial trucks were supposed to enter Gaza within four days, but only 506 trucks were allowed in. That corresponds to only 21 percent of the amount the agreement envisages. On 1 August, not a single aid truck was able to enter Gaza.

Of course, this does not result from delays in aid; on the contrary, it is the result of systematically making hunger a part of military strategy. A society that could not be killed by bombardment is being sought to be forced into submission by starvation.

On the other hand, while looking at Gaza, one must not overlook the barbaric attacks Israel has been carrying out in the West Bank in the same days. In fact, the occupation and violations in the West Bank make it easier to understand the resistance in Gaza, and also show that occupation and genocide, with all their fronts, are a whole.

While ceasefire talks continue in Gaza, military raids and usurper terror go on unceasingly in the West Bank. Settlements are being expanded on usurped Palestinian land. Settler-usurper attacks on Palestinian villages are increasing. Houses are demolished, agricultural land is confiscated, and thousands of Palestinians are deprived of their liberty through administrative detention.

Hence the policy carried out through bombardment in Gaza is complemented in the West Bank by a low-intensity but continuous policy of annexation. Israel's strategy is aimed at the same goal on two fronts with different tools. Gaza is being made uninhabitable. The West Bank is being annexed step by step by being made unlivable.

On one side forced displacement, starvation and mass destruction; on the other the expansion of usurper settlements, demographic transformation and de facto sovereignty... The methods differ, the goal is the same.

For this reason, evaluating today's ceasefire violations in Gaza only in the context of humanitarian law falls short. What is being violated here is not only the ceasefire. What is being violated are the most basic principles of international law, the limits of the law of occupation, and the Palestinian people's right to live on their own land.

By now there is really no point in wasting time on "Why does Israel violate the ceasefire?" The answer has not changed for years. The real question is why the international community, though it has experienced dozens of times that Israel regards no agreement as binding, still expects different results from the same diplomatic methods.

For Israel, agreements have never been the ultimate goal. Agreements are instruments that buy time for expansionist policies. Ceasefires are seen not as opportunities to stop the genocide but to reorganize it. And the world, falling every time for the same diplomatic illusion, gives Israel the time it needs.

It is what we have always said and we have not the slightest doubt about it: However much time, however much land or military superiority Israel gains, its end will be brought about by this very aggression and by the gains it imagines it has obtained.

But in saying this, in one corner of our mind is that a front of resistance that will not acquiesce in so much oppression, so much assault and so much aggression will inevitably emerge. If it is not the international community, it will be those whom the occupier-aggressor attacks. We still have no doubt about this, but as these violations continue one cannot help asking: Who and when?

Must we sit and wait, saying that it is a move that will bring about its end anyway, against Israel's aggression? Where will we be at the point where this fury reaches its final limits? Where will our Türkiye, our Islamic world be? Do we really have a strategic preparation for this? Or are we too waiting for, and investing in, the day when Israel will be normalized as an actor, a country, among the normal actors of the international community?

This is the question we really must ask. When the day comes, where will we be?