Fragile ceasefire and cowardly politicians return us to the reality of genocide

In the aftermath of the ceasefire, all eyes are on Gaza again, and the governments around the world look less in touch with reality as they return to their unacceptable positions.

After the government supported illegal US attacks on Iran, the ceasefire that followed revealed their unacceptable positions on Gaza. (Source: Martin Ollman/NewsCorp)

After twelve days of regional chaos in the Middle East—preceded by duplicitous diplomatic exchanges that allowed the conflict to commence—a ceasefire was announced, or rather imposed, by U.S. President Donald Trump. In the days after he ordered B-2 strategic bombers to hit three nuclear sites in Iran, the White House definitively signalled that this was the extent of its desire to engage in the conflict. Convinced that the bunker-buster strikes on Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan had succeeded in destroying Iran’s nuclear production capability, Trump called the operation a success. In the background, the horrific deaths in Gaza continued—as usual.

In the aftermath, Tehran, Washington, and Tel Aviv were all sorting through the wreckage to claim their strategic victories, but from the latter, the message seemed unheeded. The ceasefire was not warmly endorsed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who—despite reluctantly being pressured into a ceasefire position and timeline—ramped up the intensity of attacks rather than winding down in the final hours before the guns were meant to stop. While Iran agreed to adhere to the conditions, Israel sought another vector to continue the war. That excuse came in a stray missile from Iran in the final moments of the exchange, and before long, Israeli jets were airborne against Washington’s wishes, endangering the fragile ceasefire before it could even take hold. During this time, the mass killing in Gaza continued unabated.

Responding to news of the breach in the ceasefire, Donald Trump unleashed a flurry of posts—retweeted without comment by his senior officials—clearly targeting Israel. Hard words flowed: “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO, IT’S A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” Several CAPS-laden posts followed within minutes, warning Israel to honor the ceasefire, with the President seemingly enraged at his Israeli counterpart.

Trump’s incandescent anger was captured in a remarkable exchange with the press on the White House lawn. Tearing into the Israelis in a display rarely seen from a U.S. President outside closed doors, Trump growled, “As soon as we made the deal, they came out, and they dropped a load of bombs the likes of which we’ve never seen before,” before leaning into the microphones. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting for so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” The first official ‘F’ bomb by a U.S. President delivered a stark warning to Israel—across multiple platforms—in a public rebuke unseen from an American leader in decades.

Dozens of Iranian ballistic and hypersonic missiles pounded key Israeli cities like Haifa and Tel Aviv, successfully reaching their targets and exposing weaknesses in the fabled Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow missile defense systems, once thought nearly impervious. Over the twelve days of exchanges between Iran and Israel, a realisation emerged: Iran’s military capability was not to be trifled with, its society not as anti-regime as some had hoped, and the White House’s reticence doomed Netanyahu’s ambitions for endless war and slaughter across the wider Middle East—for now. But the genocide in Gaza persisted.

It comes as no surprise that while diplomatic pressure poured in from Washington to Tel Aviv—demanding adherence to the ceasefire and an end to Israel’s aggressive, preemptive campaign of decapitation strikes and illegal targeted bombings of Iranian infrastructure—the realisation of the consequences was felt in multi-billion-dollar damage bills in Tel Aviv and Haifa. In its impotence to meet Iran as a peer competitor, the IDF seemed to take out its frustrations on the defenceless people of Gaza after the ceasefire, while the rest of the world was asking why a ceasefire wasn’t possible with the Palestinians, and crying out for them to stop murdering innocents in apparant retribution.

Throughout the short conflict with Iran, nothing slowed in Gaza—only accelerating in the moments after. Ben-Gvir taunted the ceasefire from his retreat, declaring that Gaza would again be the main focus, calling for a halt to the trickle of humanitarian aid into the occupied territory. His bloodthirsty statements, no less depraved than during the ongoing genocide, stood out as increasingly unreasonable and unacceptable in the wake of the ceasefire with Iran. As the possibility of a ceasefire was visibly demonstrated between two regional powers but not for defenceless Palestinians, and as Israel continued its elimination of an entire people, a Harvard study revealed that nearly 400,000 are missing in Gaza, over half of them children.

At the chilling Israeli-administered aid sites, daily massacres unfolded. In the days leading up to the ceasefire, the death tolls were harrowing: at least 59 dead at an aid site in Khan Younis, 23 killed at an aid site in central Gaza, and the next day, over 80 deaths, including 16 civilians waiting for aid and 14 in a northern residential compound. On the day of the ceasefire, over 80 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces across Gaza, with 56 deaths reported near aid distribution sites run by the instantly ignominious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The United Nations has criticised the GHF system as a “death trap” for prioritising military objectives over humanitarian needs, with a staggering 400 deaths at GHF sites since late May 2025.

Members of the IDF are calling these checkpoints ‘killing fields’, given orders by their commanders to shoot random innocents with no predudice, and reports are coming in that the bags of flour distributed are laced with synthetic opoids. There is no mistake that this is a genocide, except for the detached politcal class of the West, who unacceptably return to saying-something-without-changing-anything, hoping to maintain the status quo of aquiesance to Israel’s genocide.

In Australia, as a regional war was entertained by our ‘friends’ in Israel and their reluctant benefactors in Washington, following unprecedented U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, a diminished and ideologically unravelled Coalition and Murdoch-flavored media pushed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to support the illegal and dangerous U.S. action. In the ceasefire’s aftermath, with Trump’s stern words about Israel contrasting with Defence Minister Richard Marles’ outdated line, “Israel has the right to defend itself,” Labor appeared to have jumped the gun. For all the pain and facial torsion it took for Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong to back unilateral strikes on a sovereign nation—appeasing a weakened pro-war Coalition and its Murdoch symbiote—they did so while discarding the international law on which our middle-sized nation depends for its security. They did so amid scenes of humans piling over each other at so-called ‘aid designation sites,’ randomly shot by tanks and small arms fire, as the most bloodthirsty leader since Pol Pot acted with impunity, and recklessly ordered attacks on Iran while ramping up the killing in Gaza, against an unmistakable and growing collective biological imperative in human populations outside Israel that this madness must stop.

The rogue state of Israel has decimated southern Lebanon, supported the capture of Syria by ISIS, destabilised Jordanian and Egyptian societies by proximity, and weighed directly on the decision-making of Western governments, including Australia. Its government—a coalition festering messianic ethno-nationalist extremists—seeks to eliminate the Palestinian people wholesale to achieve some deranged, revisionist biblical geographical delineations by displacing millions in neighbouring countries. Bezalel Smotrich admits there are 400,000 missing in Gaza and proposes solutions to remove the remaining 1.8 million. The main discussion in Australia, guided by Zionist influence in the media and political class, has been curbing antisemitism and silencing voices daring to condemn a genocide.

There is no realist Israeli foreign policy, as seen in its clash with Washington’s great-power calculations over Iran. There is certainly no sane objective in Gaza. Israel’s geopolitical aims—engaging war as a standard form of ‘politics’ and annihilation as a continuation by ‘other means’—are outrageous and bipolar, endangering the fragile international system that nations like Australia rely on. Israel’s war and its meting out of annihilation can only be sustained with U.S. support and the backing of Western allies like Australia, but it comes at the expense of the fragile crucible of international law and global credibility. In the aftermath of the ceasefire, all eyes are on Gaza again, and the governments around the world look less in touch with reality as they return to their increasingly unacceptable positions.