Ceasefire After 15 Months of Genocide

After murdering over 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza, Israel looks like agreeing to a ceasefire.
The Palestinians remain undefeated in the face of the Israeli onslaught and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise of an “absolute victory”
The ceasefire will come into effect this Sunday, and this first phase will last for six weeks. Hamas has agreed to release 33 prisoners in return for hundreds of Palestinians that Israel has held hostage.
But here there is huge uncertainty. Far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet have said they will vote against any ceasefire—and far right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has threatened to resign. If Netanyahu loses far-right support, his coalition government will collapse. So a permanent ceasefire is far from assured.
Joe Biden claims that the ceasefire resulted from 'dogged and painstaking American diplomacy' But this is gross hypocrisy. The US armed Israel and gave them political cover, vetoing a series of resolutions at the UN. If the US had not supplied the bombs, the devastation of Gaza could not have occurred.
The prevailing analysis in the Israeli media is that it was the incoming Trump administration’s pressure on Netanyahu, rather than Israeli pressure on Hamas, that got the agreement over the finish line.
But this does not imply that Trump is a peacemaker. His cabinet is full of Zionist supporters who back the expansionist aims of Israel.
After the hostages are released, Netanyahu will try to re-launch attacks on Gaza. His aim is also a full annexation of the West Bank and, no doubt, he will get US support for this.
We need to keep up full solidarity with the Palestinians. The ugly face of Western imperialism has been revealed to all. This is all the more reason why we should insist that the Irish government support the Occupied Territories Bill without concessions; that there is full mobilisation against every effort to erode Irish neutrality further; and that US troops are stopped using Shannon.