A temporary ceasefire halts killings for a while but gives no guarantee of a long-term peace based on justice.

On Friday, the 72-hour Gaza truce agreed upon for ‘humanitarian reasons’ came to an end with hostilities resuming in what by any standards is an uneven match. Pledging “no nonsense”, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s hawkish prime minister, has threatened to continue the killing in Gaza until the job is finished.

By this he means putting an end to Hamas’s ability to resist. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, however, spoke the truth when he said: “Israel is not defending itself, but its settlements.” The world has reacted with horror to Israel’s cold-blooded murder of Gaza’s civilian population under the dubious claim that Hamas is using civilians as a shield.

The bombing of two UN schools has evoked universal condemnation, and even Israel’s ally America has been constrained to voice criticism. But the issue is neither that of global fury nor of any number of ‘temporary’ cessations of hostilities. The issue — and it needs to be repeated — is Israel’s refusal to pull out of the occupied territories.

There is no denying that the methods employed by Hamas to resist Israel’s hardline policies are questionable. But what Mr Netanyahu does not realise is that Hamas is, in fact, a creation of years of Israeli injustices and barbarity that have targeted the Palestinians. And even if Israel does manage to neutralise the fighting capabilities of Hamas, groups even more extremist in nature will arise.

After having accepted the two-state solution not once but many times through public declarations and international agreements, it is binding on Israel to step away from its confrontationist policies and to meaningfully engage with the Palestinians to meet their justified demands. Otherwise Palestinians will have every right to resist the blockade imposed on Gaza.

Here are some of the fundamentals for a durable peace: Israel must end its blockade of Gaza, stop building new settlements and expanding the existing ones on the West Bank, and start pulling out of the occupied territories to pave the way for the emergence of a sovereign Palestinian state.

Without bowing to this reality, Israel will always face Palestinian resistance even as it continues to pursue, at the cost of many lives, its obvious agenda

— annexing the West Bank and Gaza.

Published in Dawn, Aug 11th, 2014