With a cease-fire deal in Gaza now formally approved by both sides, it’s tempting to give in to a sense of euphoria after so much heartless brutality since October 7, 2023. But we should maintain a sense of sobriety. According to Reuters, “The deal outlines a six-week initial ceasefire phase and includes the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and release of hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian detainees held by Israel.”

But with the brutal blockade of Gaza still in place, it will not bring an end to the genocide. The blockade in itself constitutes an act of genocide, to cite former ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo. According to international law, imposing a blockade is an act of war. That means no cease-fire can hold without lifting the suffocating siege and ending Israel’s yearslong blockade of Gaza, which is both inhumane and unlawful. The United Nations still considers Israel an occupying power in Gaza, because Israel still controls Gaza by land, air, and sea.

In fact, the deal itself allows Israel to solidify its military occupation of Gaza, thus catering to Israel’s insistence that it should maintain a permanent military presence in Gaza. That includes a vital strip of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt, along with the Netzarim Corridor, an occupation zone built by Israel to divide Gaza into a northern and southern region, coupled with Israel’s military control over an expanded “buffer zone,” which is built on the ruins of demolished Palestinian homes and displaced families along Gaza’s eastern and northern borders with Israel and cuts deep into Gaza’s small territory, thus rendering Gaza an ever-shrinking ghetto swollen with refugees.

As CNN reported, citing Palestinian officials, “Under the latest proposals, Israeli forces would maintain a presence along the Philadelphi Corridor — a narrow strip of land along the Egypt-Gaza border — during the first phase of the agreement.” The corridor, now occupied by Israel, was Gaza’s only bridge to the outside world.

What’s more, “Israel would also maintain a buffer zone inside Gaza along the border with Israel without specifying how wide that zone would be.” In other words, Israel is demanding lasting control over the two strategic corridors in Gaza — a demand that has undermined previous cease-fire talks. And while “the residents of northern Gaza would be allowed to return freely to the north of the strip . . . there would be unspecified ‘security arrangements’ in place.” This could prove deadly to displaced Palestinians who wish to return to their homes in the north. In late November 2023, two months into the Gaza genocide, Israel and Hamas reached a temporary cease-fire agreement; on its first day, the IDF opened fire on hundreds of Palestinians attempting to return to their homes in northern Gaza.

While a cease-fire might stop the worst of the bloodshed, it will not end Gaza’s miseries. It will lay bare the total destruction that Israel has wrought on the besieged strip. According to a UN report, it could take 350 years for Gaza to rebuild if it remains under a blockade. Just cleaning Gaza’s rubble could take fifteen years, according to UNRWA, not to mention thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance that remains scattered across the Strip. Israel’s ongoing assault on UNRWA would even impede immediate relief efforts.

Gaza as we know it no longer exists. When Israeli leaders and generals boast of having bombed Gaza “back to the Stone Age,” they are not speaking in metaphorical terms. Israel has destroyed Gaza for generations to come and rendered it “totally and completely unhabitable.”

And yet the deal does not mention reparations for Palestinians who have lost their homes, schools, hospitals, shelters, mosques, water wells, and grain mills and whose entire urban infrastructure has been wiped out. (In a year’s span, Israel has dropped over eight-five thousand tons of massive US-made bombs on Gaza, the equivalent of multiple nuclear bombs.) It’s more of a hostage deal. In exchange of nearly one hundred Israeli hostages, only three thousand Palestinian prisoners will be released, in stages, out of over ten thousand prisoners held in Israel torture camps in deplorable conditions — most of whom have been forcibly kidnapped from Gaza since October 2023, according to the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners Society.

This is a deplorable deal, negotiated in bad faith. Calling it a “cease-fire” is misleading. It’s a pause in genocide to allow the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza. It’s by no means permanent, merely a temporary pause in fighting with no guarantees that Israel would even adhere to the deal, especially since Israeli negotiators have insisted on keeping troops in Gaza as Israeli forces have continually violated a cease-fire agreement in Lebanon over one hundred times. (Israel’s long history of violating cease-fire agreements in Gaza is well documented.)

Netanyahu himself has made clear his intentions on several occasions. As the New York Times reported, Netanyahu wants a “partial” deal that would secure the release of hostages while allowing Israel to resume the war afterward. While Hamas negotiators have constantly demanded a permanent cease-fire, Israeli leaders have insisted that any deal should allow the Israeli military to continue their onslaught and occupation in Gaza, with Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, vowing on Monday to carry on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza: “Now is the time to continue with all our might, to occupy and cleanse the entire Strip, to finally take control of humanitarian aid from Hamas, and to open the gates of hell on Gaza until Hamas surrenders completely and all the hostages are returned.”

Releasing the hostages, of course, has never been an Israeli priority. Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has tirelessly boasted of having foiled a hostage deal “time and time again.” Netanyahu himself has consistently sabotaged cease-fire talks to save his political career. And even as it negotiated, Israel continued to massacre Palestinians in Gaza with intensified brutality and impunity, killing at least sixty-two Palestinians in twenty-four hours, including an entire Palestinian family of three generations.

US president Joe Biden has conceded that the deal is nothing but a “halt in fighting” aimed at the release of Israeli hostages. In a speech on Monday, Biden parroted platitudes about Israel’s security while paying lip service to “humanitarian assistance” for Palestinians. “The deal we have structured would free the hostages, halt the fighting, provide security to Israel, and allow us to significantly surge humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians who suffered terribly in this war that Hamas started. They have been through hell,” Biden said.

But Gaza’s hell has been Biden’s own making. It’s tragic that the cease-fire deal — which has reached a breakthrough thanks, ironically, to Donald Trump’s pressure on Netanyahu, or perhaps as Netanyahu’s gift to the incoming president — is pretty much the same agreement that Hamas accepted and Israel rejected six months ago, before tens of thousands more Palestinians were massacred in Gaza.

A cease-fire should not absolve Israeli leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nor should it absolve Joe Biden, whose administration has funded and armed Israel’s genocidal machine to the hilt for over a year while refusing to rein in Israel’s atrocities or force it to stop the bloodshed.

The grim reality of Israeli occupation should explain why countless cease-fires of recent decades have been breached in Gaza, culminating in an endless cycle of bloodshed. When you imprison two million people in 140 square miles, placing them under a merciless siege with no end in sight, no way in or out, drones and rockets buzzing overhead night and day, under constant surveillance and harassment, with scant control over their day-to-day lives and an all-around sense of living in hell, a peace deal that addresses none of these concerns will not hold.

The Gaza genocide is a particularly ugly incarnation of Israel’s violent settler colonialism in Palestine, the tragic fruit of decades of occupation and oppression of a stateless people deprived of basic rights and freedoms. Unless the root causes are dismantled — the siege lifted, the apartheid system and occupation ended — violence will continue to tragically haunt Palestinians and Israelis for years to come.