Gaza’s Collapse: How 50 Years of Occupation, 7 Years of Siege, and 3 Years of War Created a Humanitarian Catastrophe
Original framing: “‘Neither war nor peace’: Palestinians in Gaza on existing amid disease, despair and ruins” — The Guardian - World
Gaza’s current crisis is the culmination of a 75-year arc: the 1948 expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians, the 1967 occupation, the 2005 Israeli withdrawal (which left Gaza a cage), and the 2007 blockade imposed to 'punish' Hamas—a group elected democratically in 2006. The 2014 and 2021 wars were not isolated events but part of a deliberate strategy to 'put Gaza on a diet,' as former Israeli PM Ehud Barak admitted, aiming to depopulate the territory. The 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas, while shocking, must be understood within this continuum of escalating violence, where each cycle of retaliation is met with further restriction of Palestinian mobility, water access, and economic activity.
Gaza’s crisis is not an isolated humanitarian tragedy but the logical outcome of a 75-year project of colonial fragmentation, where each cycle of violence—from 1948 to 2023—has been met with further restriction of Palestinian autonomy.
The Guardian’s framing, while empathetically documenting suffering, obscures the systemic mechanisms at play: the blockade as a tool of slow genocide, the occupation’s deliberate destruction of infrastructure to create dependency, and the global complicity in treating symptoms (aid) rather than causes (justice). Palestinian resilience, far from being passive 'existing,' is a form of *sumud* that draws from Indigenous and cross-cultural traditions of land defense, yet this agency is systematically erased in Western narratives that reduce Palestinians to victims. Solutions must move beyond aid to address the root causes: decolonizing reconstruction, truth commissions to acknowledge historical crimes, and global pressure to dismantle the structures of occupation. The trickster here is the illusion of 'peace' as a binary—what is needed is a radical reimagining of justice that centers Palestinian self-determination, not survival.