The order came down from Benjamin Netanyahu’s office with clinical precision: Israeli forces are to tighten their grip on Gaza, launching a fresh offensive to seize 70% of the territory. For those watching from afar, this is another headline in a long, bloody chronicle. But on the ground in Gaza, it means families once again packing their few belongings into battered suitcases, children clutching toys, and a collective dread that the word ‘seize’ translates into displacement, loss, and a future erased.
I spoke to a man named Yousef, a father of three, who had already fled his home twice. Now he stands in a makeshift shelter, staring at a map that shows Israeli troops pushing deeper into the north and south. “Where do they want us to go?” he asked. “The sea? The sky?” His question is not rhetorical. It is a raw plea from a strip of land where the concept of safe haven has long been a bitter joke.
This new offensive is not just a military manoeuvre. It is a cultural shift, a rewriting of what Gaza will become. If 70% is taken, what remains? Enclaves so small, so hemmed in, that the idea of a viable state becomes a fantasy. The social fabric, already frayed by years of blockade and war, is being torn apart. Communities that once shared courtyards and meals now scatter like seeds in a storm. The ties that bind – the neighbourhood baker, the corner shop, the school – are severed.
What strikes me most is the psychological toll. In times of conflict, the mind seeks patterns, seeks hope. But when the ground keeps shifting beneath your feet, that hope becomes a fragile thing. I remember a Gazan woman I met years ago, a teacher, who told me: “We are not numbers. We are people with dreams.” Now, her dreams are buried under the rubble of a ceasefire that never held.
Netanyahu’s government frames this as security. But security for whom? At what cost? The human cost is measured in generations of trauma, in children who know only the sound of drones and the taste of fear. The cultural cost is the silencing of stories, the loss of a way of life that has endured for centuries. The land itself becomes a graveyard for aspirations.
There are those in Israel who protest, who march in Tel Aviv holding signs that say “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.” They understand that this path leads nowhere but to more grief. But their voices are drowned by the roar of tanks and the rhetoric of dominance.
As the world watches, I think of Yousef and his children. I think of the teachers, the doctors, the elderly who stayed because they had nowhere else to go. The 70% is not just a statistic. It is their homes, their memories, their lives. And once that is taken, it cannot be returned.
Clara Whitby, Culture & Society Editor
