[News] The new kill zone: Gaza’s borders after the ‘ceasefire’

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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  The new kill zone: Gaza’s borders after the ‘ceasefire’


      // Ramzy Baroud <https://english.palinfo.com/authors/ramzy-baroud>

Thursday 20-November-2025

The so-called Gaza ceasefire was not a genuine cessation of hostility, 
but a strategic, cynical shift in the Israeli genocide and ongoing 
campaign of destruction.

Starting on 10 October, the first day of the announced ceasefire, Israel 
transitioned tactics: moving from indiscriminate aerial bombardment to 
the calculated, engineered demolishing of homes and vital 
infrastructure. Satellite images, corroborated by almost hourly media 
and ground reports, confirmed this methodical change.

As direct combat forces seemingly withdrew to the adjacent “Gaza 
envelope” region, a new vanguard of Israeli soldiers advanced into the 
area east of the so-called Yellow Line, to systematically dismantle 
whatever semblance of life, rootedness, and civilization remained 
standing following the Israeli genocide. Between 10 October and 2 
November, Israel demolished 1,500 buildings, utilizing its specialized 
military engineering units.

The ceasefire agreement divided Gaza into two halves: one west of the 
Yellow Line, where the survivors of the Israeli genocide were confined, 
and a larger one, east of the line, where the Israeli army maintained an 
active military presence and continued to operate with impunity.

If Israel truly harbored the intention of, indeed, evacuating the area 
following the agreed-upon second phase of the ceasefire, it would not be 
actively pursuing the systematic, structural destruction of this already 
devastated region. Clearly, Israel’s motives are far more insidious, 
centered on rendering the region perpetually uninhabitable.

Aside from leveling infrastructure, Israel is also carrying out a 
continuous campaign of airstrikes and naval attacks, relentlessly 
targeting Rafah and Khan Yunis in the south. Later, and with greater 
intensity, Israel also began carrying out attacks in areas that were, in 
theory, meant to be under the control of Gazans.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, 260 
Palestinians have been killed and 632 wounded since the commencement of 
the so-called ceasefire.

In practice, this ceasefire amounts to a one-sided truce, where Israel 
can carry out a relentless, low-grade war on Gaza, while Palestinians 
are systematically denied the right to respond or defend themselves. 
Gaza is thus condemned to relive the same tragic cycle of violent 
history: a defenseless, impoverished region trapped under the boot of 
Israel’s military calculations, which consistently operate outside the 
periphery of international law.

Before the existence of Israel atop the ruins of historic Palestine in 
1948, the demarcation of Gaza’s borders was not driven by military 
calculations. The Gaza region, one of the world’s most ancient 
civilizations, was always seamlessly incorporated into a larger 
geographical socio-economic space.

Before the British named it the Gaza District (1920-1948), the Ottomans 
considered it a sub-district (Kaza) within the larger Mutasarrifate of 
Jerusalem – the Jerusalem Independent District.

But even the British designation of Gaza did not isolate it from the 
rest of the Palestinian geography, as the borders of the new district 
reached Al-Majdal (today’s Ashkelon) in the north, Bir al-Saba’ 
(Beersheba) in the east, and the Rafah line at the Egyptian border.

Following the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which codified the post-Nakba 
lines, the collective torment of Gaza, as illustrated in its shrinking 
boundaries, began in earnest. The expansive Gaza District was brutally 
reduced to the Gaza Strip, a mere 1.3 per cent of the overall size of 
historic Palestine. Its population, due to the Nakba, had explosively 
grown with over 200,000 desperate refugees who, along with several 
generations of their descendants, have been trapped and confined in this 
tiny strip of land for over 77 years.

When Israel permanently occupied Gaza in June 1967, the lines separating 
it from the rest of the Palestinian and Arab geography became an 
integral, permanent part of Gaza itself. Soon after its occupation of 
the Strip, Israel began restricting the movement of Palestinians 
further, sectionalizing Gaza into several regions. The size and location 
of these internal lines were largely determined by two paramount 
motives: to fragment Palestinian society to ensure its subjugation, and 
to create military ‘buffer zones’ around Israeli military encampments 
and illegal settlements.

Between 1967 and Israel’s so-called ‘disengagement’ from Gaza, Israel 
had built 21 illegal settlements and numerous military corridors and 
checkpoints, effectively bisecting the Strip and confiscating nearly 40 
percent of its land mass.

Following the redeployment, Israel retained absolute, unilateral control 
over Gaza’s borders, sea access, airspace, and even the population 
registry. Additionally, Israel created another internal border within 
Gaza, a heavily fortified “buffer zone” snaking across the northern and 
eastern borders. This new area has witnessed the cold-blooded killing of 
hundreds of unarmed protesters and the wounding of thousands who dared 
to approach what was often referred to as the “kill zone.”

Even the Gaza sea was effectively outlawed. Fishermen were inhumanely 
confined to tiny spaces, at times less than three nautical miles, while 
simultaneously surrounded by the Israeli navy, which routinely shot 
fishermen, sank boats, and detained crews at will.

Gaza’s new Yellow Line is but the latest, most egregious military 
demarcation in a long, cruel history of lines intended to make the lives 
of the Palestinians impossible. The current line, however, is worse than 
any before it, as it completely suffocates the displaced population in a 
fully destroyed area, without functioning hospitals and with only 
trickles of life-saving aid.

For Palestinians, who have been battling confinements and fragmentation 
for generations, this new arrangement is the intolerable and inevitable 
culmination of their protracted, multi-generational dispossession.

If Israel believes it can impose the new demarcation of Gaza as a new 
status quo, the next few months will prove this conviction devastatingly 
wrong. Tel Aviv has simply recreated a much worse, inherently unstable 
version of the violent reality that existed before 7 October and the 
genocide. Even those not fully familiar with the deep, painful history 
of Gaza must realize that sustaining the Yellow Line of Gaza is nothing 
more than a dangerous, bloody illusion.

/-Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The 
Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His forthcoming 
book, ‘Before the Flood,’ will be published by Seven Stories Press. His 
other books include ‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a 
Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior 
Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA)./

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