On Wednesday, January 15, President “Genocide Joe” Biden announced that a “ceasefire and hostage deal” had been agreed on by Israel and Hamas. The ceasefire began as scheduled on Sunday, January 19, after a delay of several hours.

This is a complex, three-stage deal. Not all the steps have been fully agreed upon, and there are sharp divisions over the deal in Israel and possibly between the U.S. and Israel. 

Here are some of the basics which have been reported so far, although some parts of the agreements may be secret. In any case, there are no guarantees that this will unfold as the Biden administration is promising, or planning. 

Stage One

The ceasefire begins with Israel and Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist organization that formally governs Gaza, halting all military conflict. During the 42 days of phase one, Hamas will release 33 of the hostages it has been holding, while Israel releases some 1,000 Palestinian prisoners it is holding. 

Humanitarian aid, which has been reduced to a genocidal trickle by Israel, would be surged into Gaza, with some 600 aid trucks entering per day. “Palestinians can also return to their neighborhoods in all the areas of Gaza,” Biden stated at his press conference on the deal. Israeli forces would begin withdrawing from densely populated areas in Gaza, and sick and injured Palestinians will supposedly be able to cross into Egypt for treatment.

As of Sunday evening, January 19, a number of these provisions are reportedly taking effect: several Israelis held by Hamas have been released, Israeli forces have begun moving away from some populated areas in Gaza, some humanitarian aid has entered Gaza, and Palestinians have begun heading back to their homes, including in northern Gaza.

Stages Two and Three: Big, Unresolved Contradictions Remain

Final negotiations on the second phase of the agreement are supposed to begin after the ceasefire has been in place for some two weeks. The stated goals of stage two include the release of all remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas, the complete withdrawal of Israel forces from Gaza, a permanent end to the fighting, and the reopening the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza. “Let me say it again,” Biden declared, “a permanent end of the war.”¹ The third and final phase would include the return of the remains of all other Israeli hostages and the reconstruction of Gaza.

None of these issues have been fully negotiated or agreed on. The deal could collapse after the first stage, but it’s also possible it will be carried through (perhaps due to U.S. pressure based on its own strategic needs).

One glaring question is this: who is actually going to be in charge of security in Gaza? Hamas fighters have emerged, in uniform, in an apparent effort to show they’re still standing and are reasserting their presence and control. Yet Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu (aka Netan-Nazi) has consistently insisted Hamas must be “destroyed.” Trump's incoming National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz, recently declared, "Hamas will never govern Gaza," and Biden talked of a future without Hamas when he announced the deal. 

The deal calls for an eventual “cessation of military operations and hostilities permanently.” Yet the evening before the agreement was set to take effect, Netanyahu emphasized that the ceasefire was temporary and that Israel had the right to return to the war if “the second stage negotiations are ineffectual,” threatening to do so in “new ways and with great might.” He also said Trump and Waltz would back Israel if it chose to resume the war.

A host of knotty and explosive contradictions are at work here, within Israel itself, for the U.S. in the region, and for the other players involved.² 

This underscores the need to remain vigilant and to resist any renewal of Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine or any other attacks on the Palestinian people or the peoples of the Middle East and the world. 

Biden Blesses Genocide Enablers as “Peacemakers”! 

Biden’s announcement came after 467 days of relentless Israeli genocide against the people of Gaza, backed and enabled by the U.S. every step of the way. Yet, when he announced the ceasefire deal, he hailed himself and his team as “peacemakers”! "Blessed are the peacemakers,” Biden said, quoting the Bible. He blamed Hamas for “starting the war” and blocking previous efforts at obtaining a ceasefire. 

Biden declared that this ceasefire was possible because of “the pressure that Israel built on Hamas backed by the United States” and the fact that “Hamas’s longtime leader, Sinwar, was killed.” “Pressure”?!?!! Try genocidal terror, slaughtering literally tens of thousands and murdering at least 14,500 children, starving and making homeless nearly two million—all financed and politically supported by the U.S. 

That wasn’t all. Biden also credited Israel’s destruction of “Iran’s air defenses,” the U.S.-organized coalition’s actions “to stand up to attacks by the Houthis, including their missile attacks in Israel,” and the fact that Hezbollah, a major supporter of Hamas, was “significantly weakened on the battlefield and its leadership was destroyed,” all as conditions which made the ceasefire deal possible. Iran, the Houthis in Yemen, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah are all reactionary Islamic fundamentalist forces, but Biden is nakedly advocating for and hailing Israel’s criminal campaigns of mass slaughter—including targeting of civilians, assassinations of foreign leaders, and wholesale destruction—as actions for “peace.”³ 

These lies turn reality inside out and upside down. 

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a brutal attack on Israel, which included killing some 1,200 people—many of them civilians—and taking some 250 people hostage. This targeting of civilians reflected the reactionary, Islamic fundamentalist nature of Hamas, which has been supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Then Israel seized on this attack to launch an all-out genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza, with the aim of making Gaza unlivable and destroying the Palestinians as a people. 

What followed was not, in the main, a “war” between two armies. It was overwhelmingly an unchecked, wanton Israeli slaughter. The result: Israel has killed at minimum 46,788 Palestinians in Gaza over the past 15 months, and the actual numbers may surpass 120,000. Some 110,000 Palestinians have been wounded. Gaza has been largely turned into rubble, its schools, homes, hospitals, farms, factories, bakeries, even cemeteries repeatedly bombed or bulldozed. 

Israel’s killing spree continued until the last possible moment before the ceasefire took effect. In the days between the announcement of the ceasefire and when it went into effect, Israel killed at least 123 people. Twenty-six were killed in the three hours between 8:30 am when the ceasefire was scheduled to take place and 11:30 am when it actually did.

Throughout these past 15 months, the U.S. has vetoed United Nations resolutions calling on Israel to halt its onslaught in Gaza five different times, and Israel has repeatedly sabotaged previous ceasefire efforts, including by assassinating Hamas's lead negotiator while he was visiting Iran. (Hamas reportedly signed onto a version of the ceasefire deal in early July.) And the U.S. has supplied Israel with $17.9 billion in bombs, weapons and other military aid, enabling the genocide to continue. 

In launching and carrying out this mass murder and destruction, Israel was acting in its capacity as an outpost for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. And the U.S. supported Israel in this all the way, both Democrats and Republicans—including Trump—whatever tactical differences they may have had with Israel at any given point. 

Further: Israel’s assault on Gaza has been a continuation and escalation of 76 years of its atrocities, ethnic cleansing and apartheid against the Palestinian people. To get some sense of this—and why the U.S. and other imperialists have supported this since before Israel was “founded,” go here, here, and here. 

The Palestinian People Desperately Need an End to Israel’s Barbaric Crimes

Even if every provision of this ceasefire agreement is implemented, Israel has rained down so much death and devastation on Gaza that the provisions for aid that are part of the deal may not even begin to meet people’s basic needs. Gazans who have been forced out of their homes by Israeli bombing and attacks are allowed to go home, but almost all homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed by Israel. Further, the status of the Netzarim Corridor—a four-mile-wide militarized staging area that Israel has built that runs the entire four-mile width of the Gaza Strip and which has prevented Palestinians from returning to northern Gaza—is unclear at the moment. Aid trucks may cross into Gaza, but 600 a day is not enough to meet essential needs of the people of Gaza, and Israel has effectively crippled aid networks in Gaza, making distribution very difficult. 

The United Nation’s senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza described how dire the situation is:  

Nowadays, one is surprised if you see children wearing shoes in Gaza. There's no winter clothes. There's no shelter. It's ramshackle, at best. Adults go by with one meal a day max, and mostly it's not a hot meal. Mothers save food from their mouth, literally, to give it to their children. Children spend their days rummaging through garbage belts, looking for anything that could be tradable.

So yes, the Palestinian people desperately need a respite from Israel’s depraved, U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza. And we in the U.S. have the duty to rise up in struggle if the Trump/MAGA fascist regime duplicates Biden’s horrific enabling of Israel’s genocide—or does even worse! 

But even more desperately, the Palestinian people as a whole—including those confined to Gaza—need the destruction of Israel’s utterly illegitimate apartheid regime. 

People in the U.S., which has enabled all this horrific suffering and death in Gaza, and beyond that around the world, need to fully confront the criminally genocidal nature of U.S. “bipartisan” support for Israel since its founding, over 75 years ago. And they need to confront the real root of all these illegitimate atrocities in the fundamental nature of the system that rules the U.S.: capitalism-imperialism.