Israel ‘Unlikely’ to Adhere to Ceasefire, May ‘Resume Full Fury of Genocide’: Ex-UN Rapporteur
After failing to achieve its goals in Gaza, the Israeli regime accepted a ceasefire that began on Sunday morning, brining at least a temporary halt to the relentless air and ground attacks which killed more than 46,000 Palestinians since October 7, 2023.
The newly agreed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas will be implemented in three phases, each involving specific measures to ensure progress and compliance.
In the first phase, 33 Israeli captives, including women and those over 50, will be released. In exchange, 30 Palestinian detainees will be freed for each Israeli captive, with a higher ratio applied for female soldiers. Israeli forces will withdraw from Gaza’s population centers to areas no more than 700 meters from the border. Displaced Palestinians will return to their homes in northern Gaza, while aid deliveries to the region will increase to 600 trucks per day. Additionally, wounded Palestinians will be allowed to cross into Egypt for treatment through the Rafah crossing. Israel will also reduce its forces in the Philadelphi Corridor, eventually withdrawing entirely.
In the second phase, remaining Israeli captives, primarily male soldiers, will be released, and further negotiations will determine the number of additional Palestinian detainees to be freed. This phase will culminate in the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.
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The third phase will address unresolved humanitarian and reconstruction issues. Bodies of deceased Israeli captives and Palestinian fighters will be exchanged. A three- to five-year reconstruction plan for Gaza, under international supervision, will begin, and border crossings in and out of Gaza will reopen.
However, Richard Anderson Falk, a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, believes that the Israeli regime is more likely to violate the ceasefire to achieve its goals, including the annexation of the West Bank.
“I think the Hamas side will do its best to keep its commitments to release hostages and uphold the ceasefire while Israel will pragmatically weigh its interests as the process goes forward, but seems more likely to break the ceasefire agreement after the first 42 days, perhaps as Netanyahu’s way of keeping his coalition from collapsing,” he told IQNA.
“Nothing short of a total Hamas political surrender including the willingness to give up whatever weapons it possesses would induce Israel to give up its unmet goals of annexation and Saudi normalization by way of a peace treaty,” he added.
What follows is the full text of IQNA’s interview with Professor Falk:
IQNA: Previous ceasefire agreements between Israel and Hamas were violated due to clashes between the two sides and ultimately failed. Do you think this agreement signifies a permanent end to the war or merely a temporary halt in conflicts?
Falk: I believe that Israel will not end the conflict until it satisfies at least one of its two goals outside of Gaza—annexation of the West Bank coupled with a declaration of Israel’s victory over the Palestinians, signified by the attainment of its goal of Greater Israel and/or normalization with Saudi Arabia as part of an aggressive coalition aiming to achieve regime change in Iran, and prepared to risk war in the course of doing so. The Trump presidency seems likely to join in such an effort. General Keith Kellogg, appointed by Trump as his Special Envoy to Ukraine has already advocated a return to a policy of ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran as a priority of American foreign policy under Trump.
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I think the Hamas side will do its best to keep its commitments to release hostages and uphold the ceasefire while Israel will pragmatically weigh its interests as the process goes forward, but seems more likely to break the ceasefire agreement after the first 42 days, perhaps as Netanyahu’s way of keeping his coalition from collapsing. Nothing short of a total Hamas political surrender including the willingness to give up whatever weapons it possesses would induce Israel to give up its unmet goals of annexation and Saudi normalization by way of a peace treaty. Israel seems unlikely to remain within the ceasefire framework once the six weeks of phase one is completed, which means that the latter two war-ending and IDF withdrawal phases of the ceasefire will never happen. It is likely that Israel would then resume the full fury of its genocidal campaign, certain to provoke Hamas to react. Israel would then use its influence with mainstream media and support in Washington to shift blame to Hamas to avoid responsibility for the breakdown in the courts of public opinion.
IQNA: How do you assess Donald Trump’s public and behind-the-scenes efforts as the U.S. President-elect to advance the ceasefire agreement and prisoner exchange?
Falk: For Trump a major incentive of achieving the ceasefire and prisoner exchange was to show that he gets things done as contrasted with Biden who let this same ceasefire agreement sit on the shelf for more than six months.
It is publicized as a demonstration of Trump’s and US leverage with respect to Israel when it actively seeks results rather than merely wants to make a rhetorical impression, but there may be more to it. In addition to a promise to Netanyahu of unconditional support, Trump could have backed Israel’s high priority issues to annex all or most of the West Bank and its interest in normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, in a manner similar to arrangements with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morrocco at the end of first presidential term in 2020, and as establishing an anti-Iran coalition with regime change ambitions.
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It is also significant that numerous Washington officials in the Trump entourage have unconditionally promised to support Israel if the ceasefire arrangements collapse regardless of which side is at fault. There is not even pretension of being objective in the sense of seeking to discern to which side the evidence of responsibility points.
Netanyahu is rumored to have given his hardline cabinet members assurance that the military campaign will resume at the end of the six-week first phase.
IQNA: How do you view the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu, as well as U.S. political considerations, in light of this ceasefire?
Falk: I think it is a relationship based on mutual respect, ideological agreement, and shared strategic interests. Both leaders are defenders of the West against the rest, being especially hostile Islamic forces. The Palestinian struggle is on one level the core expression of this geopolitical rivalry, with all the complicit supporters of Israel coming from the white dominant countries in what were the lead European colonial powers and the breakaway British colonies in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.
Arab world have condemned Israel for the genocide but have not acted materially or even diplomatically to exert pressure on Israel.
On the Palestinian side, with the exception of Iran, which is indirectly supportive of the Palestinians, the political actors siding with the Palestinians are Islamic non-governmental movements and militias in the Middle East, most vigorously the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both aided by Iran. Islamic governments in the Arab world have condemned Israel for the genocide but have not acted materially or even diplomatically to exert pressure on Israel. The alignments in this ‘clash of civilizations’ correspond closely to the political vision of Trump and Netanyahu, and recall the prophetic pronouncements of Samuel Huntington at the end of the Cold War.
IQNA: The Israeli finance minister, referring to his discussions with Netanyahu, stated that Israel has not yet achieved its objectives in the war. Can it be argued that this agreement will undermine Israel’s security?
Falk: I believe the Israeli response was never primarily about security. It was more about land and demography, more specifically about gaining sovereignty over the West Bank, and giving the settler militants a green light to make life unlivable for the Palestinians. This anticipate settler rampage has gathered momentum with its undisguised agenda of dispossessing and killing enough Palestinians so as to restore a Jewish majority population as a prelude to incorporating the West Bank into Israel, likely with Trump’s endorsement. Prior to October 7, Palestinians and Israelis were almost evenly split in the overall population of 14 or 15 million inhabiting Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. The higher Palestinian birthrate means that it is only a matter time until a majority of Palestinians are living under Israeli control and all claims of Israel being a democracy would come to an end.
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I believe the Israeli response was never primarily about security. It was more about land and demography.
In the background of my response is the growing evidence that Israel allowed the October 7 attack to happen because it wanted to display a retaliatory motivation for the death or expulsion of a large number of Palestinians, more or less repeating the expulsions of an estimated 750.000 Palestinians in 1948, what is known to Palestinians as the nakba or catastrophe. It is known that the Israel government received several extremely reliable warnings preceding the October 7 attack, including from US intelligence sources, as well as had advanced surveillance capabilities following Hamas reinforced by informers making the claimed ‘surprise’ hard to believe. Under such circumstances it is inconceivable that Israel, at the very least, should have prepared to defend its borders and nearby Israeli communities. This is not to say that Israel was necessarily privy to the details or scope of the attack, and might have been genuinely surprised by its sophistication and severity, which might explain the widespread support in Israel and indulgence throughout the world for an excessive military retaliation. Protests were small and hardly noticed in the early months of the genocide, but as the violence and denial of the necessities for Palestinian subsistence went on month after month opposition grew more intense and widespread, an impression furthered by repeated Israeli lethal interference with humanitarian aid deliveries and accompanying aid workers.
IQNA: The release of prisoners is a critical step in the course of the war. Israel has incurred significant costs by agreeing to release Hamas members and individuals convicted of violent actions, which has sparked disputes within the Israeli cabinet. In your view, what challenges will this stage of the ceasefire face?
Falk: I think the main humiliation for Israel was not the release of so many Palestinian prisoners, but the need to negotiate as equals with Hamas to recover 33 hostages in a military campaign justified from the beginning as dedicated to the destruction and elimination of Hamas as a political actor.
Anyone following these events would also have hardly known from the one-sided media coverage that Palestinian prisoners were being released as the near exclusive media focus, especially of leading platforms in the West, was on the plight of the ‘hostages,’ while ignoring the far worse plight of the civilian population of Gaza. The release of more than 90 Palestinians prisoners on the first days of the ceasefire, many of whom had endured extremely abusive treatment and were innocent of any involvement in the October 7 attack was deemed hardly newsworthy. By the end of the six-week Phase One of the Ceasefire Arrangement nearly 2,000 Palestinians are scheduled for release.
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This disparity in the relation between hostage release and prisoner release reinforces the perception that Israel values the life and freedom of its citizens so much than Hamas that it is willing to make to agree to an unequal exchange with its enemy. It is paralleled by this reverse media disparity, showing a human interest in each Israeli hostage released while viewing the Palestinian prisoner releases as a purely impersonal matter of statistics, a portrayal movingly contradicted by the crowds in the West Bank celebrating the prisoner releases, heeding their words of anguish about their detention experience (often held for long periods without charges) and their joyous embrace of ‘freedom.’
IQNA: How do you evaluate the future of Palestine, particularly the Gaza region? Some observers believe that Gaza’s current generation of children, who have lost their homes and families in this war, might take action against Israel in the future. What is your analysis?
This may take decades of further suffering for this success of prolonged resistance to be translated into a political outcome that finally realizes Palestinian self-determination in a form that the Palestinians favor, and not by an arrangement pre-packaged and imposed by the UN or outside forces.
Falk: Given the present correlation of forces, including the Trump assumption of the US presidency, I see little hope for a just resolution of Palestinian grievances in the near future. A further period of struggle, including the continuing realities of the delegitimation of Israel as a sovereign state entitled to membership in the UN and an increase in the impact of a rising tide of global solidarity initiatives generated by civil society activism, and taking the form of boycotts, divestment, sanctions, taxpayer revolt, and reinforce by reductions of trade with and investment in Israel. If the dynamics of delegitimation lead to a significant Israeli departure to live elsewhere it will be a signal that the collapse of Israel is no longer a dream of veteran residents of Palestinian refugee camps, but a real political possibility. In other words the Palestinians are winning the nonviolent Legitimacy War measure by the capture of the high moral and legal ground, and by national perseverance. This may take decades of further suffering for this success of prolonged resistance to be translated into a political outcome that finally realizes Palestinian self-determination in a form that the Palestinians favor, and not by an arrangement pre-packaged and imposed by the UN or outside forces.
If this path to the realization of basic rights is effectively blocked by Israel’s apartheid tactics of domination, even should the genocidal jagged edges no longer are present, it will undoubtedly stimulate armed Palestinian resistance especially from survivors of the Gaza genocide who lost parents and children, and in some cases, whole families. It is impossible to imagine the depths of grief, which over time will give way to a sense of rage and resentment that will seek political expression in the form of violent anti-Israel acts and movements, as well as fuel a surge of antisemitism.
IQNA: From the international law perspective, what can be done to stop the Israeli occupation, which is basically the source of years-long conflicts in Palestine?
Israel is following the same path that the colonial West chose to deal with native peoples in the countries settled, who were dehumanized, slaughtered, and permanently marginalized.
Falk: As should have become clear after decades of Israeli efforts to convert Palestinians into persecuted strangers in their own homeland, there is no path to a secure Israeli future even if the oppressor maintains its harsh apartheid regime. If that does not achieve political surrender or at least sullen acquiescence, then as a last effort to deal with resistance, engage in a revived recourse to genocide. Israel is following the same path that the colonial West chose to deal with native peoples in the countries settled, who were dehumanized, slaughtered, and permanently marginalized. These pre-modern aggressions were more or less rationalized by international law that until the last century generally legitimated colonial conquest and claims of sovereignty. In contrast, international law has now formally declared apartheid and genocide as high international crimes, but such a reclassification has proved inadequate in the face of Israeli defiance reinforced by geopolitical complicity, especially by the US.
The test of Palestinian resistance may emerge shortly and can be reduced to whether the remarkable steadfastness (samud) of the Palestinian people can withstand a final Israeli effort to transfer, eliminate, or kill the resident Arab population. There are already indications that the Trump leadership is pushing bizarre ethnic cleansing operations as favorably mentioned by Trump’s newly appointed Middle East Envoy, Steve Witkoff. It was he who proposed transferring a portion of the surviving population of Gaza to Indonesia. Even if such a bizarre proposal is discounted as mere rhetoric it exhibited an intention to aid, abet, and facilitate ‘a final solution’ that left the Jewish state in control of historic Palestine. If we assume an Israeli willingness to implement such a plan and Indonesia agreeing in exchange for being lavishly subsidized, the idea of such a proposal is out of keeping with the proclaimed ethos of the 21st century. Channeling Trump, Witkoff is talking as if the world of states was a chess board on which the US could shift the pieces at will, an assert of hegemonic prerogatives.
The views and opinions expressed in this interview are solely those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the view of International Quran News Agency.
Interview by Mohammad Ali Haqshenas
