Our Wednesday News Analysis | After the genocide: What the future holds for Palestine

Editor’s Note | This article by Muhammad Shehada, a Palestinian writer, Gaza-based analyst, and EU Affairs Manager at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, emphasizes a pivotal moment for Palestinians as they contemplate the possible release of Marwan Barghouti and the opportunity for national reconciliation.

Despite enduring considerable suffering and loss, Palestinians remain committed to justice, unity, and self-determination.

The success of these efforts relies on international backing, accountability, and strong leadership, highlighting the vital role of the Palestinian cause in shaping history.

This is reflected by a wave of international recognition of Palestinian statehood, giant weekly demonstrations in Western capitals, greater isolation of Israel, and a tidal shift in public opinion. Yet the Palestinian movement has also never been in a more disarrayed, loss-ridden, and paralyzed state.

Gaza is decimated, the Palestinian leadership remains intractably divided, the West Bank is under an unprecedented crackdown, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is obsolete.

As a fragile truce takes hold and potentially signals an end to the war, numerous questions remain unanswered, with Palestinians now facing monumental challenges and uncertainties as they try to recover from two years of unparalleled Israeli violence.

Genocidal trauma: Can Gaza become liveable again?

“We would need to invent brand new words to adequately describe the situation that Palestinians in Gaza find themselves in today,” UN officials said over a year ago.

Indeed, ‘words don’t mean anything anymore’ has become the most common sentiment on the ground in Gaza after two years of mass killing. There is the sense that everything has been said, every feeling expressed, over and over again, until it becomes hollow of meaning or resonance, with silence taking over.

The two key questions Gazans commonly ask each other are technical. First, “is your home still standing?” Yet nearly every single person has had their home bombed, burned to the ground, razed, bulldozed, or blown to pieces. The second is “how many family members have you lost?” The average answer is over 100.

Nonetheless, there is a strong and undying willingness amongst many in Gaza to remain steadfast on the land and reject any plans for expulsion, migration, or displacement. Nada, a mother whose two-year-old son was born only days before the genocide, has lived through the unimaginable...

Read more: After the genocide: What the future holds for Palestine

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OPINION | NOTHING IS 'OVER,' NOT IN THE GAZA STRIP NOR IN THE WEST BANK

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-10-20/ty-article-opinion/.premium/nothing-is-over-not-in-the-gaza-strip-nor-in-the-west-bank/0000019a-02d7-d582-a39e-5af72a040000

By Jack Khoury and Jacky Khoury
Published October 20

The same equation Israel has adopted in Gaza – where Palestinian society is consumed by internal strife, fighting over the crumbs of what little they have – is also applied to the West Bank, where repression and trampling of rights are the order of the day under a brutal Israeli military regime

Palestinians stand near a burning car reportedly set alight by Israeli settlers attempting to disrupt them harvesting olives near the occupied West Bank village of Turmus Ayya near Ramallah, Sunday. Credit: Hazem Bader/AFP

"Everything's fine now except for what isn't. Beneath this calm, the ground is trembling. Anyone who thinks a war can be ended on only one side of the fence will discover that indifference will come back like a boomerang, and the country will burn here too."

Even though violent incidents, barring casualties, still occur in Gaza now that the cease-fire is implemented, and even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners would like to keep the deal going, their patron in the White House continues holding them back.

What's becoming obvious is the sheer scale of the devastation in the Gaza Strip. The October 7 massacre is imprinted into Israel's national DNA. Its memory will remain for generations, especially for the families of the murdered, the wounded, and the hostages, who lived through the trauma in its full force.

But now that all the living hostages have returned home, is there anyone who actually cares about what's happening in Gaza and to its people, or do most Israelis still believe there are no innocents there? Will there still be protesters calling to build in Gaza?

They aren't calling for "rehabilitating" Gaza, since there's nothing left to rehabilitate, as everything is destroyed, and everything must begin from scratch. Or will the protesters prefer to stay silent and look away, shrug their shoulders and say: let them burn, let them fight each other. After all, it's easier to believe that's how things are in Gaza – that there's no one to talk to and nothing to save...

Read more: Opinion | Nothing Is 'Over,' Not in the Gaza Strip nor in the West Bank

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THE CRUMBLING ILLUSION: WHY AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION ON ISRAEL IS SHIFTING

Source: Middle East Monitor
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251020-the-crumbling-illusion-why-american-public-opinion-on-israel-is-shifting/

By Jamal Kanj
Published October 20, 2025

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside the Israeli Consulate and marched on the streets to protest Israel’s attack on Gaza, Palestine, in San Francisco, California, United States, on March 18, 2025. [Tayfun Coşkun – Anadolu Agency]

Citing new Quinnipiac and New York Times polls,
CNN’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten
noted that where voters once sided with Israel by +48 points
In October 2023, they now favor Palestinians by +1 point.

It is, he said, “the first time ever” since polling began in the 1980s
that Palestinians hold any advantage in US public sympathy.

The shift is most dramatic among Democrats, who moved from supporting Israel by +26 points to favoring Palestinians by +46—a seventy-two–point swing in just two years.

Even among Republicans,
deep generational divides are emerging,
Voters under 50 are far less supportive of Israel than their elders.

For the first time in decades, the public in the United States and across the West has begun to see Israel’s wars and occupation for what they truly are: acts of systemic injustice driven by malevolence and impunity. Social media has removed the familiar whitewash of mainstream filters, revealing truths long concealed behind carefully managed narratives that presented Israel as a victim and Palestinians as faceless aggressors.

At first, the shift in public opinion was dismissed as a fleeting wave of online teenage outrage. Others within the Zionist establishment ignored it altogether, clinging to an arrogant chutzpah born of decades of unchallenged influence over Western media. Convinced that control over the traditional press and elected officials made public sentiment irrelevant; they believed their “sophisticated” propaganda could always bring people back into their corral. Israel-firsters failed to understand that this time something fundamental had changed: people now had direct access to unfiltered images, eyewitness testimonies, and voices from Gaza that no amount of spin could erase...

Read more: The crumbling illusion: Why American public opinion on Israel is shifting