Analysis
Gaza in limbo, unlivable and invisible
Israel continues to pursue the strategy of unliveability. Making Gaza a place unfit for life – a silent genocide.
“Without mercy.” Tally Gotliv, a Likud MP and member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party, repeated it three times on live TV. She wanted the message to be clear, as relentless as the rising tone of her voice: “We no longer have hostages and, with the return of the last three bodies, we no longer have to be precise. We can attack without mercy, without mercy, without mercy.”
We did not need Tally Gotliv to tell us that the Israeli offensive in Gaza has never ended, but these words, and others like them, are useful for understanding the impulses that have driven and continue to drive the Israeli authorities for 25 months – and for the previous 80 years: supremacy over the land, aiming at its definitive conquest, involves the dehumanization of those considered alien and unworthy of mercy. If we were to ever listen to these words on this side of the Mediterranean, they should serve to reawaken consciences that have already gone back to sleep.
They should serve to revive public attention on the events in Palestine, which Western chancelleries couldn’t wait to extinguish. The enthusiasm with which Trump’s freedom-killing “peace” deal was welcomed has no other explanation than the pressing need to put everything behind us – genocide and complicity included. But the offensive continues, now more undisturbed than ever.
It continues under other forms, with identical policies: we’re no longer seeing carpet bombing (even though Palestinians are still being killed by the dozens), but Israel continues to pursue the strategy of unliveability. Making Gaza a place unfit for life – a silent genocide.
The bulldozers have never rested: beyond the yellow line – which changes its exact location every day, apparently at random, eating away meter by meter at the territory left to Palestinians – the Israeli army and the private companies that won the contracts are demolishing the little that remained standing. Meanwhile, on the other side of the yellow line, humanitarian trucks show up only in a small trickle; there is no reconstruction on the horizon, as Israel and the U.S. specifically wanted; and the poor makeshift shelters are being submerged by rain and mud.
Israel is applying a model it considers successful, the Lebanon method: a truce on paper and constant, daily violations to cement a ferocious war of attrition that remains as invisible as possible. The goal is limbo: a nominal suspension of the war that translates to a suspended reality in which the attacked population is forced to live.
This is not even a military tactic; it is a low-level political strategy aimed at generating chaos, cementing the permanent absence of a political solution and guaranteeing eternal impunity (the same impunity given sanction in Sharm el-Sheikh with the aforementioned enthusiasm).
Israel is pursuing the same strategy, under other forms, in the West Bank: military operations, closures, the ferocious and fascist violence of the settlers, home demolitions and land confiscations serve not only to take as much land as possible, but also to unravel and inhibit any Palestinian political, economic and social network. It serves to fragment, again and again, territories that are already divided – whether by drawing a movable yellow line or by closing off entire communities behind fences and barbed wire, trapped amid the murderous assaults of settlers and soldiers.
Depriving people of their home thus takes on a much deeper meaning: the removal of the place where one lives serves to strip away dignity, to humiliate, to remind people that there is no equality: some are the rulers, some are the subjugated. Making an individual and collective place unlivable – the home as well as the city – is in pursuit of a wider, structural objective: to wear down humanity and wear down community, to turn them into empty shells, to impose the necessities of survival at the expense of those of a full life.
The war that never stops, the limbo, the ephemeral utopia of a horizon of normality: this is not a military tactic, it is a political strategy.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/il-limbo-di-gaza-invivibile-e-invisibile on 2025-11-27