The Broken Ceasefire
Since the moment the ceasefire came into effect, the Trump administration has allowed Israeli attacks on Palestinians to continue, repeatedly parroting the Israeli government’s lie that it is Hamas that is fully to blame for violations of the ceasefire. The truth is that the Israeli military has violated it dozens of times, killing upwards of 100 Palestinians and wounding over 300 others.
On Sunday, Israel cut off all aid and launched a series of deadly strikes in Gaza, killing over 40 people in a single day and bringing the ceasefire agreement to the brink of full collapse. It was only after the Trump administration intervened that the ceasefire was “resumed” late on Sunday.
Trump has repeatedly demonstrated what our movements have long known: For the last two years, the U.S. government has had the power to stop the genocide — and it has actively chosen complicity at every step of the way. He even said as much during a CNN interview last week: “I had to hold them [Israeli leaders] back,” Trump remarked. “Israel will return to those streets as soon as I say the word.”
The Israeli military carried out the strikes in retaliation for the killing of two Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza, though the circumstances around their deaths remain unclear. Israeli leaders claim Hamas killed them, but other reports suggest they were killed when their vehicle ran over an unexploded ordnance. What is clear is that Israeli forces have killed dozens of Palestinians in the days since the ceasefire came into effect — and that they are looking for any excuse to renew their campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza.
What’s the yellow line?
Israeli defense minister Israel Katz wrote on X over the weekend that any Palestinian found beyond the “yellow line” — which marks the Israeli withdrawal zone as part of the first phase of the ceasefire – would be killed on sight.
The extent of the destruction in Gaza makes it next to impossible for Palestinians to know where the yellow line is, and that’s assuming they have access to a map or are even aware of its existence. Yet anyone who unknowingly approaches or crosses the yellow line is being gunned down by Israeli forces. On Friday, the Israeli military massacred 11 members of the same family, including 7 children, while they were trying to return to Gaza City in their car.
More than half of Gaza remains under Israeli control. Still, in the last 10 days upwards of half a million Palestinians have returned to the lands where their homes once stood. In a Dropsite News report from Shujaiya, Gaza City — parts of which lie beyond the invisible demarcation line — Palestinians who risked their lives to return describe the destruction and pitch makeshift tents on top of the rubble: “There are no streets, nothing left to even walk on.”
Horrifyingly, the Israeli military is already attempting to make the yellow line a permanent reality: As of this week, videos showed the Israeli military using yellow concrete blocks to mark the yellow line, stoking fears that Palestinians would be permanently cut off from their homes and lands that lie beyond.
Half a million “trapped in famine”
All the while, Palestinians continue to die of starvation as Israel allows only a fraction of the aid agreed upon in the ceasefire into Gaza. Though the ceasefire agreement stipulated that 600 trucks of aid be allowed into Gaza each day, in the days after the ceasefire went into effect, Israel restricted aid to a fraction of that amount: during the first six days of the ceasefire, only 216 trucks reached their final destination inside Gaza.
To make matters worse, the Rafah border crossing — Gaza’s main lifeline — remains closed, with the Israeli government insisting that the bodies of 15 remaining hostages in Gaza be returned before the crossing is opened. But Hamas says recovering the remaining bodies from under the rubble will require heavy machinery they don’t have. Dropsite reported over the weekend that an 80-person search-and-rescue team from Turkey was still waiting on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing to be allowed into Gaza to assist with the recovery of Israeli hostages.
Right now, only two crossings into Gaza are open, and in addition to the Rafah crossing remaining closed, crossings into North Gaza — where aid is most desperately needed — are also closed and have been for over 50 days.
Erasing the genocide
Amid the Israeli military’s deadly escalation on Sunday, top Trump officials traveled to Israel this week to try to ensure their boss’s prized deal remains on track. Though they remain committed to the ceasefire deal they helped broker, the Trump administration has no interest in a Gaza ruled by and for the Palestinians who live there. Instead, their deal lays the groundwork for a new phase in the decades-long colonization of Palestinian land, wherein Palestinians’ futures are determined not by the Israeli government but by Trump officials in Washington and the interests of their billionaire allies across the globe.
Key to this plan is the Trump administration’s push to normalize the genocide: to erase the last two years of mass slaughter, to erase the kidnapping of thousands of Palestinians to torture camps, to erase the field executions and death marches. Trump and Israeli leaders want the world to forget. We have to ensure that it doesn’t.
As the ceasefire was being announced, the Israeli military set fire to hundreds of homes in Gaza City. They also torched critical food supplies and a sewage treatment plant. A post from one of the Israeli soldiers who took part in the arson campaign read: “Burning food so that it won’t reach the Gazans, may their names be erased.”
Many of those homes had been converted by the Israeli military into makeshift bases: Burning them down wasn’t just an act of collective punishment; it was a desperate attempt to cover up the evidence of their crimes.
Gaza’s borders remaining all but closed also means foreign journalists continue to be blocked from reporting in Gaza, which is exactly what Israeli leaders would prefer. Though Palestinians have live-streamed every excruciating detail of the horror of the last two years, Israeli leaders know many around the world will continue to turn a blind eye to these atrocities until western journalists have “confirmed” what we already know to be true.
We Are Many: Millions protest Trump’s fascism
Trump is waging war on all of our communities. He has unleashed ICE on our immigrant neighbors, allowing them to abduct parents and their children from their homes in the middle of the night and disappear students in broad daylight for speaking out about Palestine.
Trump has stripped away the union rights of over a million federal workers, is working to systematically dismantle the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and has given billionaire Elon Musk free rein to fire countless federal employees, bragging that hundreds of thousands would be out of work by year end — and countless federal workers are now working without pay or will miss a paycheck for the first time because of the government shutdown. His so-called “Big Beautiful Tax Bill” gave tax cuts to the super-rich while cutting a trillion dollars from Medicaid, in what the Nation has called “an unprecedented transfer of wealth from working families to corporations and billionaires.”
Now, people’s anger is reaching a boiling point. Over the weekend, millions protested against Trump’s authoritarian agenda. Protesters filled the streets in nearly 3,000 cities and towns across the country, from the massive crowds that packed into Times Square, to the hundreds of protesters in San Francisco who created a massive “No Kings” human banner on Ocean Beach, to the thousands of demonstrators who gathered in Anchorage, Alaska. It was one of the biggest single-day demonstrations in U.S. history.
Dozens of JVP chapters and pods and countless JVP members were there: to stand up to Trump’s fascist attacks on immigrants, on civil society, and on our first amendment rights — and to center Palestine in the fight to resist Trump’s fascism.
But for many who took part in No Kings mobilizations, it’s not yet clear what Palestine has to do with Trump’s authoritarian push at home. Our movements have an important role to play in making that connection and channeling mass outrage into long-term organizing.
1. Organizing people into sustained action
Millions of people — young and old, seasoned organizers and first-time protesters, centrist liberals and democratic socialists — were angry enough to drop everything and join historic protests across the country on Saturday.
Our job as organizers is to elucidate the connections between our struggles — so we can harness that popular anger and channel it into sustained, collective action. We win by welcoming people taking action against Trump into our movements so that we can funnel them into the longer-term fight against fascism and towards a better, more just world.
2. Putting Palestine at the center of the progressive, anti-Trump agenda
Our oppressors are the same. Trump and his profit-driven, billionaire friends who want to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” at the expense of Palestinians are the very individuals leading the crusade to “make America great again” at the expense of everyday people. We will only build the mass power we need to win if we organize in solidarity with each other.
For many, the connection between Palestine and our rights at home isn’t yet clear. But the Trump administration’s path to fascist power runs right through the center of our movement. We’ve seen them test their authoritarian tactics on the Palestine solidarity movement, from the abduction and attempted deportation of student activists who protested the genocide, to recent reports saying JVP is one of a handful of organizations the Trump regime intends to target in its crackdown on “liberal” nonprofits.
This repression is meant not only to shut down our calls for the humanity and liberation of Palestinians, but to permanently crush the rights to free speech and protest in defense of anyone’s humanity. We know that this does not end with Palestine: anyone the ruling class decides is an impediment to their endless profit will become a target.
The far-right has been explicit about seeing our struggles as different faces of its common enemy. The plan to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement, Project Esther, shares authors with Project 2025, which sets out to reshape the entire country in Trump’s image. The same forces trying to take down the Palestine solidarity movement are simultaneously propelling Trump’s attacks on immigrants, workers, and queer and trans people.
Each movement under attack may feel overwhelmed, under the full glare of the Trump administration. But at this point, the vast majority of the country is under attack. The number of people whose lives Trump is threatening is such a massive population, it’s only hinted at by the millions in the streets for No Kings. That should give us confidence to keep fighting and to keep our eyes open to the new alliances we can build in this moment.
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