The bombs have stopped.
A fragile silence hangs over the flattened rubble where homes once stood. After two years of a brutal symphony of explosions and death that claimed the lives of at least 67,967 Palestinians, the world is told to breathe a sigh of relief.
A “peace plan,” brokered by the United States, has been signed.
They call it a ceasefire.
They want you to call it peace. But for the people picking through the wreckage, searching for the ghosts of their families, it is merely a pause in the slaughter. For the architects of this suffering, it is a political anesthetic, designed to make the world look away, to turn the page, to forget.
The blood is still wet on the streets of Gaza, but they want us to forget.
They want us to forget the 75-year apartheid, the 56-year occupation, the 16-year blockade. They want us to forget the ICJ’s ruling that it was “plausible” Israel was committing genocide.
They want us to forget that the court ordered Israel to stop its attacks on Rafah, and Israel simply ignored them.
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They want to wash the blood away with the ink of a hollow peace deal and declare the matter closed.
But in a corner of the world that knows the bitter taste of apartheid all too well, one nation refuses to forget.
South Africa, the country that dragged Israel to the world’s highest court, is sending a clear message: The killing may have paused, but the demand for justice has just begun.
Naledi Pandor, the former foreign minister who spearheaded the historic case, sees the ceasefire for what it is—a welcome but dangerously insufficient step. “The ceasefire is a welcome step because, of course, we want to end the killing,” she told Al Jazeera. “But I’m concerned because the struggle of the people of Palestine is about much more than the war… this genocide of the past two years.”
The struggle, she reminds us, is for “self-determination, freedom, and justice.” Things a ceasefire, signed under the shadow of American pressure, can never grant. That is why she insists, “I believe the [ICJ] case must continue… We should… ensure that perpetrators of war crimes are held to account. That is what we owe those who lost their lives.”
This is not the position of a retired politician. It is the official stance of a state that refuses to be complicit in the world’s amnesia.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was unequivocal:
“The peace deal that has been struck, which we welcome, will have no bearing on the case that is before the International Court of Justice.”
This case is our last line of defense against erasure.
It is a meticulous, damning record of the crimes committed. It is the 500-page document detailing the evidence of intent to commit genocide. It is the memory of the court’s three separate orders for Israel to cease its actions—orders that were met with contemptuous defiance.
The world wants to celebrate a new chapter.
They want handshakes and photo-ops. But justice is not a political negotiation. It is an accounting.
A final judgement may not come until 2028, but the process itself is a form of resistance. It is a dam holding back the flood of forced forgetting.
Do not let them fool you.
This ceasefire is not peace. It is an intermission. The real fight—the fight for accountability, for memory, for a final, just verdict on decades of oppression—continues in the halls of justice, led by those who remember what it means to fight for freedom. They refuse to let the story end here, with the killers walking free and the victims buried under rubble and convenient headlines.
