Trump's Board of Peace calls Hamas the obstacle to peace while Israel controls 60% of Gaza and kills daily. A framework requiring one side to disarm while the other expands is not a peace process. The occupation has a peace plan. The occupied are being asked to fund it.
Israel killed Hamas's last senior military commander in a residential building under an active ceasefire. 850 Palestinians dead since October. Strikes up 35 per cent since the Iran war paused. The word ceasefire has been doing a great deal of work in Gaza.
The US-Iran ceasefire was announced before terms were agreed, signed before the verification mechanism was designed and celebrated before either side confirmed what it had committed to. This is not how durable agreements are made. It is how pauses are managed before the next round.
The US-Iran ceasefire holds ‘until such time as’ a permanent agreement is reached. No timeline. No mechanism. No definition of what constitutes permanent. The clause renders the agreement structurally impermanent from the moment of signing. It is a war designed not to end.
The US naval blockade of Iranian oil exports did not end with the ceasefire announcement. It continued under different legal framing as a mechanism of pressure. Washington called it enforcement. Tehran called it a continuation of war by other means. Tehran was closer to the truth.
The delegations arrived. The table was set. Nobody agreed what was on it. Iran’s ten-point proposal exists in two versions — one in Farsi, one in English — and they say different things. Exhaustion sometimes achieves what reason cannot. But exhaustion without clarity is not diplomacy.
The ceasefire was three days old and both sides were already in breach of each other’s version of it. Iran alleged violations before a handshake. Israel said Lebanon was excluded. Pakistan said it was not. A ceasefire disputed before the parties meet is not a ceasefire.
The real obstacle to the ceasefire was never in Tehran. It was in Jerusalem. While Washington and Tehran were negotiating, Israel launched a hundred strikes on Lebanon on the ceasefire’s first day. The question is not whether Trump can reach a deal with Iran. It is whether he can with Netanyahu.
The October ceasefire was signed in good faith by nobody. Both sides entered it with reservations, competing interpretations and no agreed enforcement mechanism. Violations began almost immediately. What was called a ceasefire was, from the start, a temporary reduction in killing.
