After two years of relentless bombardment, starvation, and siege, Hamas and Israel have inked a ceasefire-and-hostage deal in Sharm el-Sheikh. For the exhausted residents of Gaza, this ceasefire offers an exhale, not a promise. Islamabad has hailed Hamas’s conditional acceptance of the accord as a window for a ceasefire, though more than sixty thousand Palestinians have been killed. This truce, celebrated as “phase one” of a broader plan, stipulates that Hamas will release all surviving Israeli captives while Israel frees about two thousand Palestinian prisoners, including several hundred serving life sentences. Humanitarian aid is also promised “at scale” for Gaza’s starving population. In essence, the deal swaps captives, pauses the killing, and extends a trickle of aid, but it leaves the political structure of colonial control untouched. Gaza remains a cage, just with newer bars.
To be honest, Donald Trump’s “revived peace framework,” repackaged under the illusion of diplomacy, reads like an imperial mandate, with analysts calling it a colonial scaffolding, where Gaza would be administered by Western trustees and self-appointed mediators rather than by Palestinians themselves. Pakistan’s foreign office rightly insists that any meaningful solution must include a sovereign Palestinian state on pre-1967 borders, yet this deal avoids that demand altogether. What it delivers instead is a Truman-era trusteeship in the twenty-first century, trading the vocabulary of empire for that of humanitarianism.
On the ground, Gaza remains a graveyard. More than sixty-seven thousand Palestinians are dead, seventy per cent of them women and children. Over a hundred thousand have been maimed or wounded. One in three Gazans now goes days without food, and entire families live on animal feed or rainwater. The United Nations warns of a worst-case famine, while UNICEF reports more than twenty thousand children in treatment for acute malnutrition. Even as Gaza starves, weapons contracts are renewed and embassies issue statements about both sides.
The Western world’s moral vocabulary has collapsed. The same capitals that cried for Ukraine’s sovereignty refuse to utter the word “occupation” when it comes to Palestine. The hypocrisy is glaring. A single Israeli hostage receives the world’s sympathy and airtime, yet a thousand Gazan children buried under rubble merit a statistic. Just a fleeting reference.
Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s early praise for Trump’s mediation was a diplomatic gesture, but it rang hollow to a public enraged by Gaza’s suffering. The Foreign Office later reaffirmed Pakistan’s position: solidarity with the Palestinian people and an unshakeable commitment to their right to self-determination, with East Jerusalem as their capital. Yet Pakistan, like much of the Muslim world, remains trapped, condemning atrocities while continuing to trade, negotiate, and manoeuver within the same global architecture that enables them.
A lasting peace in Gaza cannot be midwifed by those complicit in its destruction. It cannot be built on hostage swaps or aid convoys that expire with the next news cycle. A decolonised peace demands the immediate restoration of Palestinian governance, the end of occupation, the removal of blockades, and a clear timetable for Israeli withdrawal. Anything less is an armistice between the jailer and the jailed. *