Gaza ceasefire – A pause by name, while atrocities continue unabated
The world has acknowledged and observes yet another blank ‘ceasefire’. To the people of Gaza, the word has no meaning. Ceasefires in Gaza do not stop the killing; they merely rearrange it. They reduce the noise but not the cruelty. They temper the headline, not the suffering. Israel’s operations continue through loopholes, exceptions, “security necessities,” and the ever-elastic language of occupation. Even within the so-called pause, shells land in the peripheries, sniper fire continues near aid distribution zones, drones terrorise the skies, and families move through ruins trying to locate the last place still standing.
This time is no different. Hospitals are still overwhelmed with untreated wounds. Children still die from dehydration and untreated infections. Elderly people still collapse in food queues. The term ceasefire becomes a political instrument for foreign capitals, not a lived relief for Palestinians. Gaza continues to be stripped of its infrastructure, dignity, and breath. The pause is only in sound; the suffering is uninterrupted.
Families crushed in collapsed stairwells. Women giving birth without anaesthesia. Doctors operating in hallways lit by mobile phones. Men digging their children out from cement dust with their bare hands. Thousands displaced multiple times, each displacement a new silent trauma. The ceasefire has neither stopped nor softened these horrors. It has only shifted them into the quieter corners of a broken territory.
And yet, as Gaza bleeds silently under the soft cover of a “truce,” an altogether different spectacle has been unfolding in Tel Aviv.
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War as display: Tel Aviv turns Gaza’s destruction into a global showroom
While Gazan families scavenge for firewood and water, Tel Aviv opened its doors to one of the most grotesque exhibitions in modern political history: DefenseTech Week, an arms expo where the annihilation of Gaza became a marketing asset.Inside polished glass halls, with air-conditioning humming and champagne flutes clinking, Israeli defence corporations unveiled weapons that have been “combat-tested” on Palestinian civilians. The phrase is no longer even whispered – it is advertised. A point of pride. A badge of legitimacy.
Executives and generals showcased the Hermes 450 drone, AI-targeting algorithms, loitering munitions, bunker-busters, and micro-guided missiles that have torn apart neighbourhoods, schools, shelters, and apartment blocks. Representatives from the US, UK, Canada, Germany, Norway, India, Uzbekistan, Singapore, and even the European Union walked past screens displaying destruction they publicly claim to condemn. They were not horrified; they were shopping. The display verified what these killer weapons could do and had done in in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. Major defence firms—including Elbit Systems, Rafael, Israel Aerospace Industries, Lockheed Martin
One presentation stunned even seasoned observers. In a darkened room, UVision Air’s CEO narrated live drone footage of two precision strikes on a building in Gaza. The screen showed a first explosion blooming on the left flank of a structure. Then, seconds later, another strike tore apart the opposite side. The audience watched silently, as though viewing an engineering demonstration rather than the vaporisation of human life. The presenter proudly explained that these were “clips approved for sharing.”
What was being shared?
– A neighbourhood turned to dust.
– Lives extinguished in seconds.
– A weapon’s capability to kill efficiently.
For the arms industry and the attending governments, Gaza was a laboratory. A proving ground. A certification stamp. Israel has turned Gazan suffering into a lucrative export model. And foreign delegates, including India’s official team, nodded appreciatively at the precision, the lethality, the “efficiency.”
No one spoke of the mothers who ran into that collapsing building looking for their missing children. No one mentioned the families who lived on the second and third floors. No one acknowledged that the “target” was a home. In that exhibition hall alone, Gaza was stripped not only of its humanity but of its right to be mourned.
For visiting delegations, the expo was not merely a diplomatic exercise—it was an implicit endorsement of methods that executed real-world killings. Gaza’s pain became a spectacle, its trauma a commodity, and its victim’s data points in a global marketplace of war. India, among other countries, sent officials to witness the display of technology used in actual massacres—signalling tacit complicity and normalizing military crimes.
While Gazans suffer, Israel has turned the instruments of mass destruction into a global showcase. This week, Tel Aviv hosted DefenseTech Week, an arms expo presenting drones, loitering munitions, and AI-guided attack systems reportedly used in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. Major defence firms—including Elbit Systems, Rafael, Israel Aerospace Industries, Lockheed Martin—participated, while delegations from the US, UK, Canada, India, and the European Union attended.
The promotional footage shown to attendees included drone strikes on residential buildings, thermal images of civilians running for shelter, and live-fire demonstrations of AI-targeting systems implicated in killing civilians. Gaza’s destruction was displayed as a commercial asset; its ruins marketed as proof of “combat-tested efficiency.”
For visiting delegations, the expo was not merely a diplomatic exercise—it was an implicit endorsement of methods that executed real-world killings. Gaza’s pain became a spectacle, its trauma a commodity, and its victim’s data points in a global marketplace of war. India, among other countries, sent officials to witness the display of technology used in actual massacres—signalling tacit complicity and normalizing military crimes.
The human consequences that the expo airbrushes away
Outside those glittering halls, Gaza sinks deeper into catastrophe. People stand in aid queues for hours under sniper risk. Children faint from hunger. The sick die quietly because medicines remain blocked. Sewage systems have collapsed, and epidemics are lurking. Families whose homes were destroyed now live under tarpaulins that flap in the cold Mediterranean wind.
Displaced Gazans often walk for kilometres just to find water that is barely safe enough to drink. The elderly collapse on the way back to their shelters. Babies are being fed water mixed with sugar because milk is unavailable. Parents pick up their children’s bones from mass graves or from rubble sifted by bulldozers.
And while all this unfolds, the world debates “restraint,” “proportionality,” and “humanitarian corridors,” as if Gaza is a chessboard rather than a graveyard of tens of thousands.
The international community: Moral evasion as policy
While world leaders issue statements calling for restraint, concrete action is absent. The United Nations and humanitarian organizations have repeatedly warned about the crisis, but enforcement is largely missing. Meanwhile, the global arms industry profits from technology deployed in Gaza. Countries attending the Tel Aviv expo signal tacit acceptance of these actions.
This is not neutrality—it is complicity. The machinery of war faces little consequence, even as civilians bear the cost. The global response remains morally anaemic. Governments issue statements of regret, sadness, or alarm – but none take action commensurate with the crimes. The same states attending the arms expo veto UN resolutions, cut funding to agencies feeding Gazans, or deepen military cooperation with Israel. It is not neutrality; it is participation. It is not diplomacy; it is endorsement.
Human rights organisations shout into a void. International law is cited, documented, analysed — and then ignored. The world has perfected a system in which Palestinian suffering is meticulously catalogued but politically abandoned.
Ceasefire as deceit, suffering as global commodity
This ceasefire, like all those before it, is a deception — a quieting, not a cessation. Gaza remains trapped between starvation and bombardment, between rubble and burial, between global indifference and Israeli impunity.
And now, with the Tel Aviv arms expo, we see the clearest truth of all: Gaza’s agony has become a commercial asset. States do not merely tolerate the genocide; they benefit from it.
Until accountability replaces arms deals, until justice replaces spectacle, until the world values Palestinian lives more than Israeli weapons systems, ceasefires will remain nothing more than pauses in noise – not in suffering.
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