by Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
The US has negotiated ceasefires in Gaza and the DRC’s eastern Kivu Provinces, but the killing, displacement and devastation in both continue.
Vice President JD Vance is in Israel, reportedly to see if he can salvage the ceasefire that began on Oct. 10. Hamas has given Israel all 20 living hostages, and turned over the bodies of 13 of 28 dead ones. It says that retrieving the rest is going slowly because of the destruction it has to work around.
Israeli forces have largely withdrawn to the negotiated yellow line, which means they still control 58% of Gaza by land area and, according to news reports, they are regularly killing Palestinians who get too close to that yellow line. The number of aid trucks that has entered Gaza since the ceasefire took effect is 85% lower than the negotiated cap, and Israel is still bombing Gaza, claiming it’s responding to lingering armed attacks.
The ceasefire was obviously never more than a colonial plan, designed to enable Israel to have full and complete control over the Gaza Strip and continue with its plan to colonize as much of it as possible.
The Arab states appear to have pressured Hamas to accept this deal. There may have been hope that something better could be negotiated once the bombing stopped, but it hasn’t stopped and ultimately Israel is still trying to crush any hope of Palestinian liberation or even the most limited form of Palestinian statehood.
Muhannad Ayyash, author of “Lordship and Liberation in Israel-Palestine,” speaking on KPFA Radio-Berkeley, said, “The plan itself is a battlefield where Israel will continue to try to use it to advance its colonial ambitions, and the Americans are going to try to use it to advance their imperial ambitions, and the Arab states are going to try to use it to advance their ambitions for sort of working with the US and finding their stable place within the US imperial infrastructure in the region, so that they can continue to make money.
“And the Palestinian people at this moment are just viewing it as a place where they can breathe a little bit. Get a break from being killed every day. Get a break from being hungry every day. Get a break from being cold as the winter sets in and so on and so forth. All of these different sides have their agendas and, unfortunately, none of the agendas are really about the aspirations of the Palestinian people for a free, dignified and liberated life.”
Will Gaza exist as Palestinian territory in another five or 10 years? International opprobrium has not been enough to stop Israel over the past two years, but Ayyash, like others, believes that Palestinians remain determined to stay in their homeland. “If this moment hasn’t defeated the Palestinian people,” he says, “nothing can.” Norman Finkelstein, a lifelong defender of the Palestinian people, has said that he doesn’t believe justice and right always prevail and that Israel has made Gaza so uninhabitable that they will find a way to leave.
Ayyash says that pro-Palestinian popular opinion in the Arab world keeps comprador governments like the Gulf monarchies from completely capitulating to the US-Israeli agendas, and that they would risk being overthrown if they did. Ultimately, he believes they will pay the price for their collaboration in response to popular movements that will transform the region.
Whatever the outcome, one thing is clear — that Israel has become a pariah state, loathed in popular opinion worldwide.
No peace in Congo’s Kivu Provinces
What will the map of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) look like in the next 10 years? Will its Kivu Provinces have been annexed by longstanding US ally and military partner Rwanda, which has been at war there for the past 30 years?
In April 2025, in talks mediated by Qatar, the DRC and the Rwandan militia known as M23 agreed to pause the war that Rwanda escalated in January.
These talks were doomed from the beginning because the framing was based on the lie that M23 is a Congolese rebel militia, even though UN reports going back to 2012 have evidenced that M23 operates alongside Rwandan troops in DRC and under Rwandan command, which Rwandan President Paul Kagame forever denies. The names of Rwanda’s militias have changed over the past three decades, but the lie that they are not Rwandan has been convenient for the US and the corporate interests it represents.
On June 27, 2025, the US mediated and hosted the signing of a “Declaration of Principles” between DRC and Rwanda in Washington, D.C., “focusing on sovereignty, security and economic integration.” But why, if DRC was fighting M23, was it signing a peace agreement with Rwanda?
The DRC and M23 signed a “Declaration of Principles” in Doha, Qatar, claiming to commit to a permanent ceasefire and no new territorial advances by M23, meaning in fact Rwanda.
Instead, Rwanda’s militia has continued attacking and displacing Congolese villagers and tightening its administrative control of both North and South Kivu, having seized the capitals of both in January. Its annexation project is detailed in “M23’s State-Building Project: Africa File Special Edition,” a report produced by the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute.
Trump, in his supreme ignorance and narcissism, claims to have negotiated peace in (DRC) when nothing could be further from the truth. He probably couldn’t find DRC on a map, but the billionaire tech titans behind him are happy.
As the Oakland Institute writes in its new report, “Shafted: The Scramble for Critical Minerals in the DRC,” “US involvement in Congolese affairs has always been unequivocally tied to the goal of securing access to critical minerals. The ‘peace’ deal comes after decades of US training, advising and sponsoring foreign armies and rebel movements, and at a time when Rwanda and its proxy M23 have expanded territorial control in eastern DRC. This is a win-lose deal that serves US mining interests and rewards Rwanda for decades of pillaging Congolese resources.”
Could anything be more preposterous than the US posture as peacemaker? Dr. Martin Luther King’s lament that his own government is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” is as true now as it was in 1967. These “peace” agreements that brought no peace are simply weapons in its imperial arsenal.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor and independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. Please support her independent journalism on Patreon. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com.
