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cease-fire
The Time Has Arrived for a Comprehensive Middle East Peace
The United States must recognize that its own strategic interests require a decisive break from partnering in Israel’s destructive strategy.
Jun 30, 2025
The attack by Israel and the U.S. on Iran had two significant effects. First, it once again exposed the root cause of turmoil in the region: Israel’s project to “reshape the Middle East” through regime change, aimed at maintaining its dominance and blocking a Palestinian state. Second, it highlighted the futility and recklessness of this strategy. The only path to peace is a comprehensive agreement that addresses Palestine’s statehood, Israel’s security, Iran’s peaceful nuclear program, and the economic recovery of the region.
Israel wants to topple the Iranian government because Iran has supported proxies and non-state actors aligned with the Palestinians. Israel has also consistently undermined U.S.-Iran diplomacy regarding Iran’s nuclear program.
Instead of endless wars, Israel’s security can be ensured by two key diplomatic steps—ending militancy by establishing a Palestinian state with United Nations Security Council guarantees, and lifting sanctions on Iran in exchange for a peaceful and verifiable nuclear program.
Israel has driven the region to a 4,000-kilometer swash of violence from Libya to Iran through its reckless, lawless, and warmongering actions, all ultimately aimed at preventing a State of Palestine by “remaking” the Middle East.
The far-right Israeli government’s refusal to accept a Palestinian state is the root of the problem.
When the British empire promised a Jewish homeland in Mandatory Palestine in 1917, the Palestinian Arabs constituted 90% of the population and Jews less than 10% of the population. In 1947, with intense U.S. lobbying, the U.N. General Assembly voted to grant 56% of Palestine to a new Zionist state, while the Jews were only 33% of the population. Palestinians rejected this as a violation of their right to self-determination. After the 1948 war, Israel expanded to 78% of Palestine, and in 1967, occupied the remaining 22%—Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.
Instead of returning occupied lands in exchange for peace, Israeli right-wing politicians insisted on permanent control of 100% of the land, with the Likud founding charter declaring in 1977 that there would be only Israeli sovereignty “between the Sea and Jordan.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu represents this policy of domination—and has served as prime minister for a total of 17 years since 1996. When he came to power, he and his U.S. neocon allies authored the “Clean Break” strategy to block the creation of a Palestinian state. Instead of pursuing land for peace, Israel aimed to reshape the Middle East by overthrowing governments that supported the Palestinian cause. The U.S. would be the implementing partner of this strategy.
This is exactly what happened after 9/11, as the U.S. led or sponsored wars against Iraq (invasion in 2003), Lebanon (U.S. funding and arming Israeli aggressions), Libya (NATO bombing in 2011), Syria (CIA operation during 2010’s), Sudan (supporting rebels to break Sudan apart in 2011), and Somalia (backing Ethiopia’s invasion in 2006).
Contrary to the glib promises by Netanyahu to the U.S. Congress in 2002—that regime change in Iraq would bring a new day to the Middle East—the 2003 Iraq War augured the events that were to come across the region. Iraq descended into turmoil, and since then, each new war has brought death, destruction, and economic disarray.
This month, Israel attacked Iran even as negotiations between Iran and the U.S. were underway to ensure the peaceful use of Iran’s nuclear program—repeating the same WMD propaganda that Netanyahu used to justify the Iraq War.
Israel has been claiming for more than 30 years that Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. However, on June 18, 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general stated that there is “no proof of a systematic effort” by Iran to develop nuclear weapons. More to the point, Iran and the U.S. were actively engaged in negotiations according to which the IAEA would monitor and verify the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program.
The attack on Iran proves yet again the futility and nihilism of Netanyahu’s approach. The Israeli and U.S. attacks accomplished nothing positive. According to most analysts, Iran’s enriched uranium remains intact, but is now in a secret location rather than under IAEA monitoring. In the meantime, with Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, neither peace nor security have been achieved.
Israel has driven the region to a 4,000-kilometer swash of violence from Libya to Iran through its reckless, lawless, and warmongering actions, all ultimately aimed at preventing a State of Palestine by “remaking” the Middle East.
The solution is clear: It is time for the United States to recognize that its own strategic interests require a decisive break from partnering in Israel’s destructive strategy.
Prioritizing genuine peace in the Middle East is not only a moral imperative, but a fundamental U.S. interest—one that can only be achieved through a comprehensive peace deal. The key pillar of this deal is for the U.S. to lift its veto on a Palestinian State on the borders of June 4, 1967, and to do so at the start, not in some vague distant future that never actually arrives.
For more than 20 years, Arab nations have backed a practical peace plan. So too has the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC), with its 57 member countries, and the League of Arab States (LAS), with its 22 members. So too have almost all the nations in the U.N. General Assembly. So too has the International Court of Justice in its 2024 ruling that Israel’s occupation is illegal. Only Israel, with support from the U.S. veto, has stood in the way.
Here is a seven-point peace plan in which all parties would benefit. Israel would gain peace and security. Palestine would achieve statehood. Iran would win an end to economic sanctions. The U.S. would win an end to costly and illegal wars fought on Israel’s behalf, as well as the risks of nuclear proliferation if the current violence continues. The Middle East would win economic development, security, and justice.
- First, an immediate cease-fire would apply across the entire region—and the cease-fire would include an immediate release of all hostages and prisoners.
- Second, the U.N. Security Council would vote upfront to welcome Palestine as the 194th U.N. Member State on the June 4, 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel and Palestine could subsequently agree on mutually desired border adjustments.
- Third, Israel would withdraw from all territories occupied since 1967. U.N.-mandated international forces would ensure a peaceful, orderly transition; a transfer of Palestinian territories to Palestinian authorities; and mutual security for both Israel and Palestine.
- Fourth, the territorial integrity and sovereignty would be guaranteed for Lebanon, Syria, and all states in the region. All non-state armed groups would be demilitarized, and foreign troops would be withdrawn.
- Fifth, the U.N. Security Council would adopt an updated nuclear agreement with Iran, including binding verification, and with all economic sanctions on Iran lifted alongside Iran’s verified compliance with the peaceful uses of its nuclear program.
- Sixth, Israel and all Arab and Islamic states would establish full diplomatic relations following the admission of the State of Palestine as a U.N. member state.
- Seventh, the Middle East nations would establish an international fund for rebuilding the war-torn parts of Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, with contributions coming from within the region and from external sources.
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Can We Stage a Jailbreak From the Grim Prisons Created by the Gaza War?
Life becomes limited when we accept that it must be a nightmare for the weak, when we confess that we are more addicted to comfort than we are to compassion.
Jun 04, 2025
Here at the United Nations in New York City, the Security Council is expected to vote on a resolution calling on all parties to respect an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza.
The slaughter in Gaza entraps and attacks the helpless, turning shelters into mass graves, erasing entire families, weaponizing nutrition and famine. The spiraling violence shrieks for our attention, screams for effective protection. Who will save innocent people from snipers, aerial attacks, tank-fired missiles, poisoned water, and starvation? The U.S. and many allies instead work to insulate Israel from accountability.
“Overcoming this cocoon of protection,” said international human rights lawyer and former U.N. official Craig Mokhiber, “requires solidarity between movements, unions, religious communities, and like-minded states working to isolate the Israeli regime and to impose economic, trade, travel, diplomatic, cultural, and other consequences to compel change.”
Meanwhile, all of Gaza remains an open-air prison containing numerous centers where people, including children, are tortured by Israel’s starvation, siege, and bombing.
In NYC, on day 14 of a Veterans For Peace and Allies Fast for Gaza, a former U.S. Marine who helped initiate the fast, Phil Tottenham, urges us to care about Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman whose witness on behalf of Palestinians apparently led to her unjust imprisonment.
The current administration has slated her for deportation purely on the grounds that she criticized the government of a foreign country. Far from her home in New Jersey, she is trapped in a Texan county jail. Her plight makes me think of another prisoner, Ron Feiner, an IDF soldier who chose to face prison rather than continue attacking people in Gaza. “I’m horrified by the never-ending war in Gaza,” said Feiner, “by the abandonment of the hostages, by the continued killing of innocent people, and by the complete lack of political vision.” He is now on day nine of what could be a quite dangerous 20-day sentence in an Israeli military prison.
The director of Gaza’s now-demolished Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, is suffering a longer and much more perious sentence at Israel’s grim Ofer Prison, where his work to heal the sick has seen him designated an “enemy combatant,” and where multiple protracted beating sessions—torture sessions really—have possibly cost him an eye
I think of pediatrician Dr. Alla al-Najjar, whose valuable work at the Nasser medical complex has cost her the lives of all but one of her 10 children, as well as her husband, also an M.D. They were taken from her in a targeted strike on her home while she was at the hospital complex attempting to save other Gazan children. Now she continues her work, trying mightily to save 11-year-old Adam, her only surviving child.
We must also note the appalling conditions of ordinary Palestinian prisoners, many of them held without charge. “They are subjected to a systematic campaign of abuse, starvation, and deliberate medical neglect,” said a recent Addameer report, which goes on to describe “widespread arrest campaigns across cities, villages, and refugee camps, which have led to a massive increase in the number of prisoners and detainees.” Prisoners survive on minimal rations, and many endure brutal and life-threatening treatment.
Meanwhile, all of Gaza remains an open-air prison containing numerous centers where people, including children, are tortured by Israel’s starvation, siege, and bombing.
None of this has been inflicted for the purposes of freeing the remaining hostages captured by Hamas and by the other armed groups who flooded into Israel on one day of rebellion, 20 months ago. The cease-fire agreed upon last November would, had Israel and the U.S. honored it, have provided for the release of all the hostages. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist collaborators would have lost their excuse for ethnically cleansing Gaza, and after that the West Bank.
In 1972, an iconic photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, “running naked, screaming in agony, her body burned by napalm dropped by the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese army,” became a catalyst which helped end the war in Vietnam. Now, 50 years later, images of burning children in Gaza are relentless.
Recently, a video of 7-year-old Ward al-Sheikh Khalil, her tiny body surrounded by flames, went viral. She and her family were sleeping in a school where forcibly displaced Palestinians had moved into classrooms and the courtyard. She survived Israel’s aerial attack, but her mother and five siblings did not. Her father remains in critical condition.
Life becomes limited when we accept that it must be a nightmare for the weak, when we confess that we are more addicted to comfort than we are to compassion—when the service of our appetites causes us to ignore the starving and those deliberately consigned to flames. We who fast might not succeed in our attempted “jailbreak” from this grim prison where we must watch the inmates die off one by one in the next ward over. But in whatever way you can, we urge you to join the attempt.
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Video Shows Girl Trying to Escape Inferno as Gaza Family 'Burned Alive' in Israeli Massacre
"What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians," said former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
May 26, 2025
Video footage of a young girl trying to flee an inferno caused by a Monday Israeli airstrike that killed dozens of Palestinians including her mother and siblings sparked global outrage and calls for an immediate cease-fire in what one former Israeli prime minister called a "war of extermination."
Medical officials in Gaza said that at least 36 people were killed by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bombing of the Fahmi al-Jarjawi School in the al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City. The Gaza Government Media Office (GMO) said that 18 children were killed in the "brutal massacre."
"The school was supposed to be a place of safety. Instead, it was turned into an inferno," Gaza Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal told reporters. "We heard desperate cries for help from people trapped alive inside the blaze, but the fire was too intense. We couldn't get to them."
From the flames of the massacre committed by the Israeli criminal occupation forces at Fahmi Al-Jarjawi School in Gaza City’s Al-Daraj neighborhood — a school that had become a refuge for displaced families — comes the image of a child: Ward Jalal Al-Sheikh Khalil, the only… pic.twitter.com/FMpXlFOMN9
— حسام شبات (@HossamShabat) May 26, 2025
Video recorded at the scene of the strike showed the silhouette of a young girl—identified as 7-year-old Ward al-Sheikh Khalil—moving against the infernal backdrop as she tried to escape the blaze. According to The National, paramedic Hussein Muhaysin rushed in to rescue the child, whom he said "was moments away from death."
"When we pulled her out, she was in shock, silent, trembling, unable to comprehend what had just happened," Muhaysin said. "We couldn't bring ourselves to tell her that her entire family was killed in the bombing."
The child's mother and at least five siblings were reportedly killed in the bombing.
"Only her father survived, and he is now in critical condition," said Muhaysin.
"We see tragedy every day, but holding a child who has lost everything, who doesn't even know yet, that's a kind of pain no one can explain," he added.
The IDF admitted to the bombing—one of 200 it said it carried out Monday—and claimed it targeted "a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control center." As usual, no evidence was provided to support the claim.
Meanwhile in the northern Gaza city of Jabalia, another predawn IDF strike
reportedly killed 19 people—mostly women and children—sheltering in the Abdel Rabbo family home. Medical officials told reporters that recovery operations were still underway on Monday afternoon, with charred and mangled bodies being pulled from the rubble.
Moumen Abdel Rabbo, who rushed to the scene following the attack, told The National: "It was sudden. The house was completely flattened. Ambulances barely made it through to recover the wounded and the dead. Some bodies are still trapped under the rubble."
Abdel Rabbo said that Israeli bombing continued nearby and drones buzzed overhead as first responders—who are often attacked and killed by Israeli "double-tap" strikes—dug through the ruins in search of survivors and victims.
"How can we search for survivors under fire?" he asked. "These were civilians; mothers, toddlers, elderly people. This wasn't a military target. It was our home."
The GMO said Monday that more than 2,200 Palestinian families have been entirely wiped out since October 2023.
The U.S.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a statement Monday condemning the school shelter bombing and Sunday's "barbaric" killing of two Red Cross workers—weapon contamination officer Ibrahim Eid and hospital security guard Ahmad Abu Hilal—in an IDF airstrike on their home in Khan Younis. The weekend bombing followed the March 23 massacre of 15 Palestinian first responders including Red Crescent paramedics by Israeli ground troops in Rafah.
"How many more children, women, the elderly, journalists, healthcare workers, and first responders must [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu slaughter with American weapons before [U.S. President Donald] Trump forces him to accept a permanent cease-fire deal that ends the genocide for good and frees all captives?" asked CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad.
"Every hour that Israel's genocidal crimes continue with impunity—and with our government's complicity—adds more dishonor to a shameful period in the history of our nation and the world," Awad added.
Hamas, which led the October 7, 2023 assault on Israel that left more than 1,100 Israelis and others dead—at least some of whom were killed by so-called " friendly fire" and under the intentionally fratricidal Hannibal Directive—is believed to still be holding 23 living hostages of the 251 people it kidnapped during the attack.
On Monday, the Trump administration refuted reports that Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire proposal by Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff under which 10 hostages would be released in exchange for a 70-day truce.
Although Witkoff told CNN Monday that the "deal is on the table" and that "Israel will agree" to it, he subsequently walked back his claims. An unnamed Palestinian official told The Times of Israel that Witkoff changed his mind on the proposed deal. The envoy blamed Hamas for an unspecified "unacceptable" response to proposal, which he also claimed he never proffered.
Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes including extermination and forced starvation in Gaza—said Monday evening that he hopes to be able to announce at least some progress toward a hostage release deal on Tuesday and that his government "will not give up on the release of our hostages, and if we do not achieve this in the coming days, we will achieve it later."
Israeli forces are currently carrying out Operation Gideon's Chariots, a campaign to conquer, indefinitely occupy, and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza to make way for possible Jewish recolonization.
Amid IDF attacks including a Friday airstrike on the Khan Younis home of Drs. Hamdi and Alaa al-Najjar that killed nine of the couple's 10 children, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote that his country's relentless obliteration of Gaza amounted to "war crimes."
"What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians," said Olmert, who led Israel during the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead war on Gaza. "We are doing this not because of an accidental loss of control in a particular sector, not because of a disproportionate outburst of fighters in some unit—but as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, viciously, maliciously, recklessly."
While Israel has nominally allowed a trickle of aid to enter Gaza—where officials say hundreds of people, mostly children and elderly, have starved to death in recent days—officials said Sunday that only around 100 of the 46,200 trucks scheduled to enter Gaza over the past 84 days have actually made it into the besieged enclave.
Hamas said Sunday that "the occupation orchestrates the crime of starvation in Gaza and uses it as a tool to establish a political and field reality, under the cover of misleading relief projects that have been rejected by the United Nations and international organizations, due to lack of transparency and minimal humanitarian standards."
On Sunday, Jake Wood, who led the controversial U.S.- and Israel-backed organization established to distribute aid in Gaza, resigned, citing concerns that the mission would violate basic "humanitarian principles."
The U.N.'s International Court of Justice is currently weighing a genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel that cites the "complete siege" among evidence of genocidal intent.
More than 190,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israel's 598-day annihilation of Gaza, including at least 14,000 people who are missing and feared dead and buried beneath rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. However, a peer-reviewed study
published in January by the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet found Gaza fatalities were likely undercounted by 41%.
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