It blows my mind that serious people are talking about this cease-fire as if it is a valuable goal which must be pursued, or a possible victory that may lay within our grasp this week.

If Israel wanted to cease fire, they would have. It seems unlikely that there are military objectives and targets still remaining in Gaza on any significant scale. I actually wonder if Israel has some kind of program to secretly “lose” caches of weapons and ammunition or something, to keep supplying an enemy that surely has run out of any conceivable type of supplies after now more than a year, or if they have simply taken the mask off and are wandering a landscape of unarmed, starving stragglers, periodically killing some at random.

If the cease-fire goes through, it will be a short period for Israel to rearm and rest up before resuming the killing. There is no possible sense in which the current Israeli government agreeing to cease fire is a meaningful outcome to report on the progress towards.