There is nothing to be said. The city is being encircled from the south and the north in preparation for the attack. “Gideon’s Chariots II” signals the continuation of destruction and demolition. The expected outcome for Gaza City, and what remains of its neighborhoods, is a carbon copy of Jabalia, Al-Zaytoun, Al-Tuffah, Shujaiya, and Rafah. A great devastation will turn vibrant neighborhoods into ruins for rodents. Amid this devastation, one million people are consumed by thoughts, anxieties, and fear of the future; they are suspended between the earth and the sky. They realize that staying means waiting for death, and that displacement is the experience of living with death. We are all waiting for the hand of fate or a miracle that will permit all this to end. What I have said is not pessimism, but the reality that none of us has the right to beautify for the protection of feelings.

– Youssef Fares, August 20, 2025, Gaza (translation from Arabic)

Ceasefire negotiations have become a supplementary technology for obliterating Gaza. This observation was already plausible last year. It is certain today. The notion that these negotiations alone will lead to a mutually agreed, lasting ceasefire, particularly as the obliterating genocide has only advanced, is unlikely. On the one hand, the obliterating power now faces less military resistance and is reinforced by both willing and unwilling supporters; on the other hand, this power cannot achieve the emptiness of the land it seeks. Only total Palestinian surrender, preferably via self-annihilation, will satisfy this obliterating force. But disappearance cannot be the goal of negotiations. To negotiate is to engage with another, commit to pausing violence, step back, and establish a ceasefire. To negotiate is also to proceed on a terrain separate from the militarism of the obliterating power, a terrain of good faith. By no stretch of the imagination can negotiations, no matter how unequal, pursue the disappearance of a subject population or be held while one party is pursuing the other’s disappearance. Such talks are not negotiations, even in the presence of proud mediators who mediate to moderate Palestinians, that is, to force their hand. Even those regional magicians cannot force such an outcome. But they can await it. Thus, other forces are necessary to bring about a ceasefire—a crack—and a cessation of this chapter of genocidal obliteration. Negotiations alone will not do.

That the negotiations continue, and that Palestinians in Gaza still hope for a ceasefire from them, discloses not naivety but a heart clinging to the possibility of a miracle: an event that surpasses the bounds of this international order, for which the creation of Israel was a founding moment. But the mind also knows better: Israel will stop when it decides to or when it is forced to stop. Absent a decision to stop, who will force it? In a world that limits actuality to the West as a moral and political project, and dares not even imagine Palestine’s gradual actualization, let alone liberation, no matter the worthiness-seeking performance of the Oslo-contracted Palestinian Authority, where would the stopping come from? In a world where Palestinians are neither disposable nor redeemable, but where their suspended existence and resistance are in question, who will halt the state that represents the West’s redemption in the second half of the twentieth century? The past twenty-two months have taught us this: such a world can only wish the Palestinians to vanish. Only then will the hearts cease to be tormented by Palestinian resistance or suffering. But if this lesson is remotely accurate, then this world itself must end, its actualities must be cracked, or other possibilities must be augmented. The view from this world—“a world not for us,” to cite Ghassan Kanafani—must not be totalized.

Gaza’s endurance in the face of this world is primarily due to the possibilities opened by the struggle of its people. Abandoned by its friends (one is commonly abandoned by friends, not by enemies or spectators) who are unwilling to take the risk of drawing near to its destructibility, Gaza has accumulated instructions from its hundreds of days before the world. These days teach us of an inexplicable ability not only to survive, but to replicate images of life amid the rubble, reiterate a rickety previousness, find breaths before death, hesitantly sing to the noise of drones, courageously recover bodies and bury them, foresee fainting while operating, go hungry to feed another, risk death to bring food, start a school in a tent—and write, not to seek recognition of one’s humanity, but to bracket the totality of obliteration (to do what negotiations could not do, and what international law is unable to compel the “friends” to do). But Gaza is also now depleted. The days before are exhausted.

Gaza’s days before are nothing like the international community’s day after, or even the future of liberation (when such a future arrives, Gaza will have welcomed it; thus, the thought of this future will have been colored by sadness and grief). But the distinction between the days before and the day after should not be mapped out on the distinction between humanitarianism and suffering, on the one hand, and politics and reconstruction, on the other. What we could see, if not for the broken heart of the observer recoiling in horror, are days of arduous activity and the use of bodies, land, and rubble. If the adjective “political” still matters, it should mark the days before, not the day after, if only because the effects of the obliterating genocide would have been much worse had it not been for the resourcefulness of the Palestinians in Gaza. And if the people (genos) at the core of the concept of genocide is a political category par excellence, then Gazans are the primary political actors at this historical moment. Not that they care to be qualified as such.

And yet, it is precisely the days before—the days that matter most—that we, the other inhabitants of this earth who stand with Gaza, are no longer able to support, augment, or touch. Our collective political protest in many parts of this earth has waned. Not because we don’t care, but because we fail. We have also been banned by an obliterating power, whose dictates have crossed oceans. Our protest might still touch the future, but not the days before. We call this politics. Along the way, we realize that the world that is common and shared in its limited actuality binds us to obliteration. If we are indeed of this world, then we, too, are complicit. And because it is difficult to see beyond—and before—this world, we retreat in horror as we condemn the genocide to mark our distance. Only a few of us still know how to act in the days before. But perhaps there is still time to release Gaza from its horrors—both in reality and in our thoughts—and to learn its lessons in the struggle of destructible life. Unbearably, it is Gaza that teaches us even as it undergoes the most unbearable of ordeals. Can we receive its lessons? Or will we only learn to repeat once again, never again?