How the Empire Calls It Peace While Gaza Is Still Being Destroyed
A Word the Pulpits Will Not Say
There is a lie that minions of the empire tell themselves, and they tell it most eagerly when a war has been declared over. The lie is that the killing has stopped. We told ourselves this lie about Gaza in October of 2025, when a ceasefire was brokered with great fanfare and the emperor in Washington took his bows. The cameras turned away. The flags came down to half-mast and then went back up. And the citizens of the empire, who had grown weary of the names of the dead, exhaled and returned to their commerce, and the next war, with Iran, comforted by the word ceasefire, which they took to mean that the fire had ceased.
It has not ceased. I write to tell you, as plainly as I can, that the slaughter the world agreed to call genocide is still going on, that it did not end with the truce but merely changed its tempo, and that the radical Christian conscience is not permitted the luxury of looking away simply because the dying has become quieter and more bureaucratic. The Prince of Peace wept over a city that did not know the things that made for its peace. He weeps now over a strip of land that the powers of the earth have decided is expendable, and over a church that has, once again, fallen silent.
That It Is Genocide: The Plain Reckoning of the Law
Let me be precise, for the conscience requires precision and the empire profits from fog. The word genocide is not a slur to be flung in anger. It is a legal term, codified in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, drawn up by humanity in the smoke of the Holocaust as a vow of never again. The Convention defines genocide as any of five acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction; imposing measures to prevent births; and forcibly transferring the group’s children.
In September of 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, after two years of investigation, concluded that Israel had committed four of those five acts against the Palestinians of Gaza. The Commission found that Israeli authorities and security forces committed killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births. Under the law, the commission of even one such act establishes the actus reus, the guilty deed itself. Four were found.
But a deed alone is not genocide; the law requires the dolus specialis, the specific intent to destroy. Here too the Commission did not flinch. It found that explicit statements by Israeli civilian and military authorities, alongside the pattern of conduct of the security forces, indicated that the acts were committed with intent to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza as a group. Its chair, the former UN human rights chief Navi Pillay, declared that the responsibility for these atrocity crimes lay with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons, who had orchestrated a genocidal campaign with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza. The report went so far as to name the Israeli president, prime minister, and former defense minister as having incited genocide, and it warned that UN member states could face legal consequences should they fail to act.
This is not the verdict of a partisan. It is the considered judgment of the body the nations themselves appointed to look. The matter rests now also before the International Court of Justice, where South Africa’s case proceeds with a gravity the empire would prefer you not notice; by an order of May 2026 the Court directed further pleadings, fixing time limits stretching to 2029, for the machinery of justice grinds slow while the machinery of death grinds on. Whole nations have lined up to intervene. The intent has been confessed aloud. Netanyahu, by his own reported boast, sneered that had they wanted to commit genocide, it would have taken exactly one afternoon, as though the slow strangulation of a people over years were somehow proof of restraint rather than method. The radical Christian does not need a tribunal to know murder when he sees it. But when the tribunals agree, the silence of the churches becomes not merely cowardice but complicity. When clear signs of genocide emerge, the Commission warned, the absence of action to stop it amounts to complicity. Let that word land on us.
The Dying That Did Not Stop
Now to the heart of the matter, the thing that most needs to be understood: the genocide is ongoing. The ceasefire of October 10, 2025, was sold to the world as the end. It was nothing of the kind. It was a change of gears.
Consider the arithmetic of a truce that kills. By the first week of June 2026, the death toll in Gaza since October 2023 had climbed past 72,988 Palestinians killed and more than 173,000 wounded. But look closer at the months after the guns supposedly fell silent. Since the ceasefire came into effect on October 10, 2025, the Gaza Ministry of Health documented more than 978 Palestinians killed and nearly 3100 wounded in the period that the world calls peace. The UN’s own human rights chief, Volker Türk, marking six months of this so-called calm, described an unrelenting pattern of killings reflecting continuing disregard for Palestinian lives, enabled by sweeping impunity, as airstrikes, gunfire, and shelling persisted daily across Gaza. He said the thing the empire cannot bear to hear: Palestinians have no blueprint for survival, whatever they do or do not do, wherever they go or do not go, there is no safety afforded to them, and it is hard to square this with a ceasefire.
These are not stray accidents, the unavoidable friction of winding down a war. Israel has continued daily violations of the truce, a strike on an apartment in one week, a vehicle on a street in another, children among the dead with a regularity that has become, in the chilling phrase, a new normal. The leader of Hamas in Gaza was killed by an airstrike on a residential building in May of 2026, months into the “peace.” Bodies are still being pulled from the rubble; hundreds of corpses have been recovered from the ruins even as the toll mounts, with countless more believed to remain beneath collapsed buildings that rescue crews cannot reach. A ceasefire is supposed to be the moment the bleeding stops. In Gaza it became the moment the bleeding was rationed.
The Bread Withheld
If the bombs are the loud instrument of destruction, the withheld loaf is the quiet one, and it is, if anything, more deliberate. The Convention names it specifically: deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction. There is no surer way to do this than to control whether a people may eat.
In August of 2025, for the first time in the history of the Middle East, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification formally confirmed famine in Gaza. More than half a million people were trapped in famine marked by widespread starvation, destitution, and preventable death. This was not the cruelty of drought or the failure of harvests. The doctors of Médecins Sans Frontières put it without euphemism: the malnutrition crisis was entirely manufactured; before the war, malnutrition in Gaza was almost non-existent, and it was years of systematic blockade of humanitarian aid and commercial goods that severely restricted access to food and clean water. An Israeli study itself, reported in the spring of 2026, found that the starvation had been the fruit of deliberate policy, the slow turning of a valve.
And here is the bitterness of the truce: even now, the valve remains half-closed. The World Food Programme, which knows precisely what is needed, has stated that just to cover basic humanitarian food needs, more than 62,000 metric tons of food are required every month, and that the aid actually delivered remains a tiny fraction of what over two million people need to survive. It has pleaded, again and again, for at least 600 aid trucks per day to be allowed through northern, central, and southern crossings in a sustained and predictable manner. During the earlier, fuller ceasefire of 2025, the UN agencies brought in six hundred to eight hundred trucks a day, and by political will turned back the tide of a man-made famine, with no diversion of aid reported. The lesson could not be plainer. When the empire and its client wish the people to eat, they eat. When the will is withdrawn, they starve. The UNRWA Commissioner-General said it cleanly: the mass starvation can be stopped; it takes political will.
That the will is still withheld in 2026 is proof that the genocidal condition persists. The UN Commission, even after the truce, recorded that Israeli authorities had closed and reduced border crossings, suspended humanitarian movements in certain areas, almost completely suspended medical evacuations, and prevented Palestinians from returning to their homes. A famine pushed back is not a famine ended; the UN has warned that under any renewed hostilities or halt in inflows, the entire Gaza Strip could again face famine, with tens of thousands of children still projected to suffer acute malnutrition. The loaf is being dangled, not given. This is the politics of the open hand that may close at any moment, and a people kept alive at the pleasure of their destroyer are not living; they are being managed toward an end.
The Shrinking of the Promised Land
There is a third instrument, slower than the bomb and quieter than the famine, and it may be the most permanent of all: the swallowing of the land itself, acre by acre, so that even were the killing to stop and the food to flow, there would be no Gaza left to return to.
Behind the demarcation the world calls the “Yellow Line,” Israel has done something that ought to chill anyone who claims to love peace. In May of 2026, Netanyahu disclosed that Israel had extended its control to 60 percent of the Gaza Strip and announced that he had ordered the military to expand that control to 70 percent. Read that figure slowly. More than half, reaching toward three-quarters, of the homeland of a people, seized and held by the army that the world’s own commission has found guilty of genocide against them. Behind its Yellow Line, Israel has forced civilians out and bulldozed most remaining buildings, while new maps quietly redraw an even larger restricted zone, cordoning off nearly two-thirds of Gaza’s territory and herding the displaced into an ever-narrower sliver in the west.
And in the land it holds, it builds nothing and razes everything. Amnesty International reported that since the so-called ceasefire of October 2025, Israeli forces have continued to demolish homes and other buildings in areas under their full operational control east of the Yellow Line—areas Palestinians are forbidden to return to, comprising more than 55 percent of Gaza’s total area. The New York Times found that more than 2,500 buildings had been razed in the months after the truce began. Satellite analysts watched it happen in real time: Israel first leveled entire neighborhoods and hundreds of buildings, turning that part of Gaza into a wasteland devoid of inhabitants and recognizable landmarks, and then, on the blank canvas, constructed military roads, outposts, and permanent earthen walls, giving it the possibility of perpetual control of a territory emptied of Palestinians.
The strategic intent is not hidden; it is poured into concrete and earth. Satellite imagery shows the Israeli military building new bases and aggressively upgrading existing positions through the spring of 2026, with one outpost east of Gaza City expanding its surface area by an estimated seventy percent. The analysts who study these images call the likely outcome by its true name. If the present course holds, one wrote, it will amount to forced displacement and conquest; day by day, Palestinian Gaza is shrinking and a new Gaza is being forged through bulldozers and barriers. A Hamas spokesman, whatever else one thinks of that movement, described the human meaning with painful accuracy: the whole people crammed into a narrow strip in the west, an area less than thirty percent of the territory. This is the genocidal act of inflicting unlivable conditions, written upon the earth itself, so that the destruction outlasts the destroyers. It is abundantly clear that the occupying forces intend to make the Strip ever more uninhabitable for the Palestinian residents, ensuring the land will be vacated to enable its eventual seizure.
What the Followers of Jesus Must Do
So, what are we to do, we who confess that Jesus is Lord and that Caesar, in Washington as surely as in Jerusalem, is not?
We must first refuse the lie of the word ceasefire. We must not permit the empire to launder an ongoing genocide through the vocabulary of peace. What matters a peace, I ask you, if it permits killing, maiming, starving, and the bulldozing of a society’s every dwelling? “Peace I leave with you,” said our Lord; “my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives” (John 14:27). The world gives peace as a pause between military profits, a ceasefire on imperial terms with the engine of destruction left idling. The Kingdom gives peace as the end of the love of the sword altogether.
We must refuse, too, the comfortable partisanship that lets us cheer one set of bombs and weep over another. The God of the Gospel does not divide humanity into the deserving and the disposable, however eagerly the empire does. We weep for the Israeli child and the Palestinian child alike, for both bear the image of God. But to weep for both is not to pretend that both wield equal power. A people penned into a sliver of rubble, their food rationed by their jailer, their homes erased behind a line they may not cross, are not a party to a conflict. They are its victims, and the prophets of Israel’s own scriptures would have known exactly what to call those who grind the face of the poor and call it security.
And we must, by every lawful means, refuse to finance it. This is the unglamorous heart of the matter and the reason I have spent so many words on this site teaching about how the warfare state is fed. The bombs that fall on Gaza, the bulldozers that level it, the blockade that starves it, these are paid for, in no small part, with money rendered up by us, willingly, every April and in every transaction the warfare state taxes and inflates. To withhold unto Caesar what the conscience cannot in good faith surrender, to starve the machine as best we can, rather than feed it, to break the silence of the churches that have for too long blessed what Christ would have wept over, this is the obedience the hour demands.
The fire in Gaza has not ceased. It has only learned to burn more quietly, that we might more easily ignore it. Let us refuse the ignorance. Let us name the genocide that is still being committed, mourn the dead who are still being made, and demand the bread and the safety and the land that are still being withheld.
May we have the courage to be a people who will not look away.
Praise Be to God.
