I would spend a month inside the “humanitarian zone”, as Israel has named a few dozen square kilometres in the centre and south of Gaza. This “zone” primarily comprises the Al-Mawasi coastal strip, along which over a million displaced persons are literally crammed in a sea of tents. Inland, it also includes parts of the cities of Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, the latter far more ravaged than the former. From the south of AlMawasi, where I would be staying, I now had an unobstructed view of the shelling, from both land and sea, that was still targeting the last apartment blocks still standing in Rafah, down to the Egyptian border.
“There is no safe place left in the Gaza Strip”, as humanitarian organisations have been hammering home for many months, a message that becomes crystal clear in the heart of the besieged enclave. The insistent hum of Israeli drones is only one element in the soundscape of constant attack. Children in Gaza make bets as to who will be first to identify an F-16 fighter jet or Apache helicopter flying over, even if it means bluffing. They’re unbeatable when it comes to artillery impacts, machine-gun fire and strikes by the lightweight drones known as quadcopters, which can operate very close to the ground. That these detonations blend with the cock’s crow at dawn and the rhythm of the waves makes them no less frightening.
People of all ages have developed a relative notion of distance. When there’s a burst of automatic weapons fire, they note without blinking that it’s “far off ” – a “far off ” that can be measured in a few hundred metres, sometimes only two hundred. Or it might be coming from a funeral procession, or, as the local euphemism has it, “family disputes”, which tend to be more performative than bloody, despite the very real risk of stray bullets. An Israeli strike, on the other hand, is soon followed by a concert of civil defence sirens, as inhabitants grab their phones to ensure their loved ones have been spared. Information circulates after each dramatic event with astounding speed, images being diffused almost instantly on social media.
Since the start of Israel’s blockade in 2007, the Gaza Strip has often been described as “the world’s biggest open-air prison”. This already densely populated prison lost more of its 365 square kilometres when Israel established a 300-metre buffer zone inside the length of its border. Demonstrators who attempted, in vain, to approach the Israeli fence during the “marches of return” in the spring of 2018 paid the price in dozens of casualties and thousands of wounded. The number of lower limb amputations was unprecedented, even in a Gaza disfigured by cycles of clashes between Hamas and Israel, in 2008–2009, 2012 and 2014.
Yet the men and women of Gaza refer to those years of suffering as the “good old days”, literally in Arabic, the “sweet days”. This is because the Palestinian enclave has been methodically laid to waste since October 7, 2023, with the overwhelming majority of the built environment demolished or damaged. Six days after the start of its offensive, the IDF ordered the departure of more than a million inhabitants from Gaza City and the north of the enclave. Despite this, nearly half the bombardments hit Gaza’s supposedly “safe” central zone, which dissuaded some civilians from leaving the north of the Gaza Strip, but prompted a great many others to flee central Gaza toward the south. As for the expansion of the buffer zone along the Israeli border, it sliced off 15% of the Palestinian enclave’s surface area, which had become a no-go zone, on pain of death.
When on October 27, 2023, the IDF launched its reoccupation of the Gaza Strip, after three weeks of extremely harsh bombardment, nearly 1.5 million inhabitants had already fled their homes. Half of these displaced persons took refuge at United Nations sites, which became saturated at three times their capacity. Over 100,000 civilians crowded into hospitals, churches and public buildings, and a similar number sought shelter in schools. Tens of thousands of others chose to sleep outdoors, but on the edge of a UN site where they believed, mistakenly, that their security would be assured.2 Due to the destruction of Gaza’s last functioning flour mill, people had to wait on average five hours for a ration of bread.
On December 1, 2023, following a seven-day truce – the only pause in 15 months of hostilities – Israel resurrected 50-year-old plans for redeveloping the enclave. It divided the Gaza Strip into 620 “blocks”, numbered with no coherence whatsoever: Blocks 1 and 2 are adjacent to blocks 20 and 2363, block 50 is next to 219, and the Nuseirat refugee camp is divided into blocks 662 and 2325. It is on the basis of this plan that the population has been displaced in a cascade of evacuation ultimatums, from square to square in a wild game of hopscotch. Residents of one or more blocks receive “advanced warning of an attack” via social media, text message or even airdropped leaflets. Targeted civilians have very little time to make a decision on which their survival and that of their family depends. Flight is not always the safest choice, given the countless examples of inaccurate maps, incoherent data and evacuation routes under fire.
The IDF’s methodical destruction has gradually cleared what it calls the Netzarim Corridor, which divides the Palestinian enclave in two. It cuts across the two main north–south roads, Al-Rasheed Road along the coast and Salah al-Din Road, which leads to the Rafah crossing into Egypt. Both these roads, which the invaders describe as “humanitarian corridors”, serve to channel the crowds of expelled people towards the south. Palestinian civilians who move from north to south cannot return. And crossing the Israeli roadblocks carries considerable risk, especially for adult males, under threat of arrest, interrogation and even detention, based on facial recognition or random denunciation. Only international aid and humanitarian workers are allowed to travel from south to north in the Gaza Strip.
At the start of 2024, 85 % of Gazans had already been displaced inside the enclave, sometimes several times, due to bombardments. The offensive Israel launched on Rafah on 6 May marked another escalation. The border crossing with Egypt was closed, sealing the Gaza trap around its 2.1 million inhabitants.6 The IDF captured the some twelve kilometres along the Egyptian border, the Philadelphi Corridor. The crowds of internally displaced persons who had sought some sort of protection from close proximity to Egypt were driven out, this time northward, by fierce fighting in Rafah.
During the summer of 2024, the IDF encroached on territory it had not yet captured, each time using evacuation orders to drive the population further on. On UN maps, the dark pink military zones, with the Netzarim and Philadelphi “corridors” now several kilometres wide, stretch as ruthlessly as the light pink areas, where military operations are covered by evacuation orders. In the zones still white on these maps, humanitarian organisations are required to “notify” their movements to the occupiers, who monitor everything by drone. “Coordination” remains essential for any journey within pink zones, subject to the arbitrary will of the officer on duty.
More than a million people have now been driven to AlMawasi, a coastal strip some fifteen kilometres long that Israel defines as a supposedly safe “humanitarian zone”. At the start of the twenty-first century, Al-Mawasi was a mere village of about a thousand inhabitants, surrounded by Israeli settlements and off-limits to the rest of the Gazan population. Even Al-Mawasi residents were not allowed to go to the beach down below, which was reserved for settlers. The Israeli withdrawal in 2005 left vast areas unoccupied, forming a “green zone” to which two decades later the invaders decided to push inhabitants of urban centres that were to be “cleansed”. In this dumping ground for populations in distress, which could be extended or reduced as hostilities continued, the density exceeds 30,000 people per square kilometre – compared to 1,200 in October 2023. Between May and November 2024, Israel bombed this zone some sixty times, every time claiming to target “terrorists”.
Yet it only took Washington’s irritation for Israel to consent to loosen its grip. On October 13, 2024, US secretaries of state and defence warned the Israeli government that, failing an improvement in the humanitarian situation in Gaza within 30 days, it would suspend US military aid. Shortly thereafter, the IDF announced the eastward expansion of the “humanitarian zone”, enlarging it from 13% to 19% of the Gaza Strip. While this extension allowed only a tiny minority of displaced persons to return to largely demolished neighbourhoods in Khan Younis, it was sufficient for US officials to certify that Israel had respected its humanitarian obligations, paving the way for additional arms shipments.
Such certification is yet another scandal in the United States’ virtually unconditional support for Israel’s war against Gaza. By late 2024, the figures in the UN appraisal of the humanitarian disaster were staggering: 87% of housing units (411,000) had been destroyed either entirely (141,000) or severely or partially (270,000). Over 80% of commercial facilities and two-thirds of the road network were damaged. A total of 1.9 million women, men and children had been forced to flee between one and ten times, and a survey of 800 local MSF workers mentioned an average of five consecutive displacements. Nearly a million displaced people were not equipped to face the winter, while half a million were stuck in flood-prone areas. Gaza’s displaced had one and a half square metres of space per person in their makeshift shelters. That’s right: one and a half square metres.
In the reality behind these data patiently collected by humanitarian organisations, there are the open-air rubbish dumps where barefoot children roam. There are the plastic tents that sway in the wind and rain, the semblance of a roof held up by a broom that also serves to sweep out water from repeated leaks. There are holes dug in the sand for latrines, with tarps strung across to provide a semblance of privacy. There are the domestic wells dug in haste in a corner of the tent, with a basin and a rope to provide for minimal daily needs. There is the stench of stagnant mud that never dries out due to persistent damp. There is the fear of neighbours who are seldom chosen, so close by, so noisy, so invasive. There are rumours that spread, fuelling resentment and disputes, recriminations and jealousy. There are endless days with no prospects, spent pining for a ceasefire that’s always postponed.
And yet, due to some sort of recurring miracle, all these women and men who have been forced to bend so many times – to enter the family tent, to wash at the bucket, to bear the weight of a few possessions for one, two, three, four, five exoduses, to shield themselves and shield the weakest when the shelling and shooting starts again – these are the very same women and men who, every morning, show themselves to the world as carefully groomed as possible, dignified and upright, courteous and sometimes even smiling, as though emerging from a reality at peace and not the endless nightmare that Gaza has become.
Excerpted with permission from A Historian in Gaza, Jean-Pierre Filiu, Context/Westland.
