A ceasefire that offers Israel a license to kill and seek revenge with US blessing

By Elijah J. Magnier

The so-called “peace president” Donald Trump has granted Israel a blank cheque to continue its war under the false label of a ceasefire. In an extraordinary display of cynicism, the United States now blesses the idea that Israel can “defend itself” and even “seek revenge” for the death of one of its soldiers in Rafah, a southern Gaza city already flattened by months of occupation. The phrase “seek revenge” has no place in the language of diplomacy or international law; it belongs to vendetta, not justice. Yet Trump used it casually, offering a green light to a military that has already destroyed most of Gaza’s infrastructure and killed tens of thousands. His words amounted to a presidential licence to kill.

This so-called “defensive right” is nothing more than a political instrument — a moral disguise for perpetual aggression. The ceasefire, celebrated by Washington as a triumph of diplomacy, has become a hollow performance, a carefully scripted illusion of restraint. In reality, it is a one-sided truce: Israel retains full freedom to strike, assassinate, and invade at will, while Palestinians are expected to remain silent, passive, and even grateful for their own subjugation. 

Israel’s Defence Minister, Israel Katz, underlined this hypocrisy with open arrogance, declaring that “no Hamas leader will be safe,” a statement that effectively legitimises extraterritorial assassinations. His words were a barely veiled reference to Israel’s renewed campaign of targeted killings abroad — a campaign already stained by a recent botched attempt in Qatar. Under this perverse logic, the ceasefire is not a pause in violence but a licence for selective murder, a slow-motion continuation of war disguised as peace. The United States, meanwhile, boasts of having “imposed calm,” yet in practice it has designed a system in which one side kills with impunity while the other is blamed for dying. It is a grotesque inversion of morality, a diplomatic lie constructed to shield criminality behind the rhetoric of peace.