THE CEASEFIRE is still in place, said Donald Trump yesterday, after Israel launched massive air strikes on Gaza dozens of times in 24 hours.

Hamas has accused Israel of committing 80 violations of the ceasefire since it began, killing dozens of people and wounding hundreds in just over a week. 

In the deadliest attack, 11 members of the same family, seven of them children, were killed in Gaza City when an Israeli tank fired on the vehicle in which they were travelling.

Israel in turn has accused Hamas of ceasefire violations and has claimed that people were targeted because they crossed the “Yellow Line” they had announced. Yet the restricted areas are not clearly marked and can be confusing. 

And a claim that Hamas fighters emerged from tunnels to set off an explosion in Rafah, killing Israeli soldiers, has been debunked since in fact it was an Israeli settler-operated bulldozer running over unexploded ordnance.

That incident was enough for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to justify stopping all aid to Gaza and resuming air strikes. But the White House and Pentagon quickly learned the truth, and told Israel, so that Netanyahu quietly stated that the checkpoints would be reopened.

For Israel, this is par for the course, and its talk of “enforcing the ceasefire” is actually double-speak for continued bombardment. There are forces in Israel — notably national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir — who want to continue the war and drive out the Palestinian population.

In a podcast interview on “The Unfiltered View with Israel Ellis,” Avner Avraham, former officer of the Israeli secret service Mossad, said that Gaza has “no future,” and that Israel will engineer false-flag attacks in order to “erase” the territory.

In these circumstances, it is worrying, if not entirely unexpected, that Trump has appeared to walk back on his 20-point peace plan, which included keeping Gazans within the territory. According to yesterday’s Times, he told Fox News: “We could get all the people that live there into decent homes throughout the region. Egypt has a lot of land, Jordan has a lot of land.”

He went on to say that Gaza was “all rubble” and that houses built in other Middle Eastern countries “would be paid for by the wealthiest countries there.”

This is simply a repetition of the longstanding Israeli claim that the Palestinians are just Arabs, not a distinct people, and that there are plenty of places in the Middle East for Arabs to go.

It’s smoke and mirrors from Trump. But the Palestinians will not accept it, and they know from bitter experience that the refugees from the 1948 Nakba were second-class citizens in the countries to which they were forced to flee.

The global campaign in support of Palestine must continue. And that must include bringing the war criminals to book, including Keir Starmer and his Cabinet.