For Palestinians, disarmament would mean national suicide
A young Palestinian boy looks on as 53 unidentified bodies are buried in a cemetery in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on 13 February 2026
Raja Abdulhaq writes in Middle East Eye on 17 February 2026:
Four months after the latest ceasefire in Gaza, Palestinians are still dying as a result of Israeli aggression.
If not by bullets and air strikes, then by winter cold, rain and enforced malnutrition. With Israel’s failure to effectively utilise the Jabalia Doctrine, committing genocide to force surrender, it has now turned to humanitarian crisis as its primary tool of subjugation.
The choice presented to Palestinians is cruel: surrender your right to armed resistance or die a slow and silent death.
During the height of the war, Israel weaponised the issue of captives to justify its ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Today, Israel is using the resistance’s weapons as an excuse to maintain Palestinian suffering, leading to their physical and spiritual surrender.
Both the United States and Israel are explicitly demanding that the Palestinian resistance disarm as a prerequisite for the reconstruction of Gaza, cornering it into choosing between the biological survival of Palestinian society and the survival of the Palestinian cause.
While the disarmament demands are presented as a reasonable price to mitigate the apocalyptic conditions in Gaza, in reality, they aim to finish the job of ethnic cleansing. The objective is not only to remove the cost of the Israeli occupation but also to escalate the settler-colonial process of eliminating the natives on all levels.
For Palestinians, agreeing to disarmament would mean national suicide.
Shifting goalposts
Throughout two years of relentless war, Israel weaponised the events of 7 October and the Israeli captives to justify the mass murder of civilians and the systemic destruction of civil society, including bombing hospitals, schools, churches, mosques and apartment buildings.
Israel’s go-to talking point after every crime was the targeting of Hamas tunnels as an act of self-defence and the freeing of Israeli captives. With the release of all Israeli captives, Israel is continuing the annihilation of Gaza by shifting the goalposts to the weapons of the resistance
Since the finite number of captives brought Israel two years of war, the weapons of the resistance can buy indefinite time. As long as a rifle or even a kitchen knife remains in Gaza, Israel can continue the genocide under the pretext of demilitarisation. This emphasis on disarmament when discussing the “day after” is integral to the Zionist project of crushing the Palestinian spirit of resistance.
The founders of Zionism, building on European colonial legacies, theorised that destruction and displacement were prerequisites for building the state of Israel. Following the footsteps of European settler-colonial projects in the United States and Australia, Zionism is structurally a zero-sum project: there is space for only one people and one state.
Since settler-colonialism is fundamentally about land theft and the replacement of the native, Zionists established the state of Israel in 1948 by killing thousands of Palestinians and destroying more than 500 towns, leading to the displacement of at least 80 percent of the population of that land to make room for new European settlers.
Elimination process