A U.S-led ceasefire between Israel and Hamas went into effect on Oct. 10, but the ceasefire’s state of uncertainty brings anticipated worries to those with ties to it.
The ceasefire negotiated the exchange of both dead and living hostages, but was paused by Israel following the delayed return of a deceased hostage and the death of an Israeli Defense Force soldier that Hamas denied involvement in.
The ceasefire declared to be resumed by Israel late Tuesday following an Israeli attack that killed at least 109 Palestinians according to Al Jareeza.
Palestinian students like political science major Usama Habash, who is also the Liberal Arts Campus’ Inter Club Council vice president, spoke about Tuesday’s attack .
“I look at all the stuff that has happened in the past, how there have been previous ceasefire agreements. … It’s always a harassment campaign and always a barbaric campaign from the Israeli Defense Force. When I saw the ceasefire, I knew that it wasn’t going to last because it never has lasted. I wanted it to. I really did, but here we are, where now they are blaming Hamas again, and they’re going straight back to bombing the Gaza Strip, it almost never meant anything. What’s the point of having these meetings? We’re talking out the ceasefire when it’s just going to be gone in a couple weeks. That’s not a ceasefire, that’s just occupation continued,” Habash said.
Habash also felt as if Palestinian voices have gone unheard on campus.
“What I have done on campus is advocating during board meetings, where I talk about myself being Palestinian, and feeling like I’m not respected as a Palestinian based on the actions of the board. … They’re so invested in diversity, yet when it comes to the Palestinians, they just completely ignore them, and it makes me feel left out, and not just me. Many other Palestinians people here on campus. There are many of them, I’ve met many of them. There’s staff members even who feel left out,” Habash said.
Regardless, Habash believed that everything boils down to the war being a humanitarian crisis.
“My main concern is human rights. And that’s something that I feel like has just been bombarded and buried under bureaucratic B.S. honestly. We keep on forgetting the fact that there are actual human beings that are constantly living under fear, living under famine, living under unhygienic conditions. And they are faced with brutality every single day. I think if we can just understand there’s a humanitarian crisis, then we could pave the path to a better tomorrow,” Habash said.
At LBCC, groups of Pro-Palestine students have protested on campus or attended Board of Trustee meetings since March 2024 in response to statements made by the school or to demand divestments from multinational investment company BlackRock, specifically regarding the company’s involvement in arms dealing.
At these Board of Trustee meetings, a self proclaimed Jewish zionist has appeared to “counter” statements made by pro-Palestenian protestors since Dec. 2024.
Al Barlevy believes that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in their ancestral home according to the Bible and equated anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism.
“Prior to the war breaking out on October 7, 2023, I never called myself out as Zionist or anything. I’ve been a Zionist, but there was no need to talk about it. The reason I bring it out there is because all these anti-Semites who claim to be anti-Zionist, I want to be a Zionist in their face… I’ve gone to multiple other governmental bodies in which (protestors) might show up. Basically I can only go when I’m aware and LBCC is the only ones where they still show up. Every other city council meeting that I’ve gone to, they stopped showing up. So it’s all because of the persistence on the other side,” Barlevy said.
Regarding the ceasefire, Barlevy expressed relief and credited President Donald Trump for his intervention.
“I think it’s wonderful. I think it’s overdue and I’m glad Trump basically managed to get Netanyahu off his high horse, he got Egypt and Qatar to get off, Hamas off their high horse because both Israel and Hamas wanted the war to go on for perpetuity, which is ridiculous. So I’m glad Trump was able to get the two sides to stop,” Barlevy said.
Megumi Nakazawa, a social justice major and activist who has protested at UCLA’s campus, the Consulate General of Israel in LA, in front of Fox News, in front of LA City Hall, and at a Long Beach City Council meeting in front of mayor Rex Richardson, refuses to call the war a conflict, but rather a genocide.
“A conflict has an implication that it’s two equal powers in a conflict. This is definitely not the case. It’s a genocide where one side has funding and military weapons supplied from the West, and the other has pretty much nothing and is trapped in a small strip that only stretches five miles wide. That is what it has been declared as by the UN report and by many other genocide experts, so it’s not my words. And it never was personal to me. I never really knew much about Palestine until I guess I started seeing the reports from Palestinian journalists and seeing the truth from first-hand witnesses and Palestinians in Gaza when that finally kind of broke social media. And I saw the images, I saw the stories, and you know, learned more about it. That’s when I became very involved, not because of any specific reason other than feeling like as a human being, I ought to care. I was taught my whole life that we should never repeat history of genocide. We learned about the Holocaust, we learned about different genocides, like I remember studying the Rwandan genocide and Armenian genocide and all these things that I grew up being taught that we should never repeat,” Nakazawa said.
Nakazawa spoke about how the ceasefire has failed to keep Palestinians safe, mentioning the recent attack on Tuesday and the blockage of aid.
“Even if on paper it is called a ceasefire, unfortunately, in the past we have seen that Israel does not keep these agreements or even fulfill the demands of the ceasefire… Over 104 people were killed (Tuesday) night in a bombing that just happened, and that includes 35 children.
Nothing about what is happening reflects a ceasefire. A ceasefire would mean that they would let in the aid that was agreed upon, but they’ve only let in a fraction of the aid… it’s honestly very disheartening to see Israel getting away with all these war crimes and no political leaders are stopping them. Unfortunately though, we are not surprised because Israel has proven to get away over and over again with war crimes with no accountability,” Nakazawa said.
Despite feeling disheartened about the ceasefire, Nakazawa plans to continue her activism for Palestine and other countries under similar circumstances.
“It takes generations for these systems to crumble, and everything we’re seeing right now is the offspring of imperialist ideologies that we saw in the past, with the colonization of the Americas and Africa and Asia and all those things we learned in our history books about the West colonizing and extracting resources and committing massacres and erasing culture, we know that those are not just eradicated overnight. So that tells me that as an activist, I need to be able to sustain myself for the long haul, and that means showing up, being part of community for doing things that help me maintain my humanity and my emotional, physical health so that I can continue to show up because we can’t afford to burn out or to give up. The oppressor wants for us to tap out, but that’s not an option until liberation is achieved, not just for Palestinians, but for all people in the world who are under an occupation or ethnic cleansing in Sudan and Congo, all over the world in Latin America, we’re seeing in Venezuela, I believe that our administration is killing people who were fishermen under the claim that they are drug dealers with no evidence to back that up. This happens all over the world where our administration just targets people and kills people without even investigating the real evidence just out of these racist supremacist ideologies,” Nakazawa said.
