Gaza: eight dead in new strikes, a year after a ceasefire that still kills

According to Le Monde, which cites Gaza's civil defence and hospitals, new Israeli strikes killed eight people on Sunday in the Gaza Strip, including a child. The paper recalls that more than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire was agreed a year ago. Israel and Hamas accuse each other of violating it.

What the wire report does not say: who the targets were, what military justification Israel offers for these specific strikes, or what is being prepared on the diplomatic front. We will not invent anything. What remains are the facts: dead people, one of them a child, and a "truce" that has produced more than 1,500 deaths in twelve months.

From here on, this is our reading. First question: what is a ceasefire that tolerates such a toll for? The sober answer: to dress up the war. You change the vocabulary and keep the machinery. Communiqués speak of mutual violations; the hospitals, for their part, count the bodies.

Second question: who can act this way, for this long, without paying the price? A state, first. Not a moral abstraction, but an apparatus of force (army, intelligence, budget) that holds the monopoly of organised violence. Facing it is a besieged territory and an armed movement that does not weigh the same. The symmetry of the accusations masks this asymmetry of means. Lenin saw in the state an instrument serving class interests. We do not need to transpose everything mechanically to observe that the Israeli public force operates with guarantees that others do not have.

Third question: who backs it? Here, the imperialist analysis becomes useful again. In this reading, military alliances, arms contracts and spheres of influence are the political shell of economic rivalries between great powers. The Middle East is a crossroads of energy, trade routes and capital. Powers with interests there also have bases, arms sales and clients. This dispatch contains no figures on aid or deliveries, so we do not cite any. But the framework is there: as long as the political and material support of the sponsors remains intact, the cost of a deadly "truce" remains bearable for those who strike.

Cui bono, then (who benefits?)? Not the people of Gaza, obviously. Those who profit from the stalemate are those whose power or order books feed on permanent tension: general staffs, governments that cultivate a state of emergency, arms manufacturers. Again, this is a structural hypothesis, not evidence placed on the file.

International law and the "rules-based order" have their spokespeople, who are very articulate. We are still waiting for them to explain how a ceasefire that does not stop the strikes is enforced. Eight dead on a Sunday: the figure is dry, but it counts people, not a line in a communiqué.