ISRAEL is driving a new phase of its campaign to seize more of Gaza, pushing the ‘yellow line’ that marks the edge of its control deeper into the territory in breach of the ceasefire and stepping up attacks on the Palestinians who live along it.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the army to take 70% of the enclave.
The line is marked in places by yellow concrete blocks that Israeli troops have been steadily shifting westward.
Since the ceasefire took effect in October, Israel has expanded the area under its control from 53% of Gaza to well over 60%, and it is pressing further still.
In the Al-Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City, residents woke on Monday to find the blocks moved at least 100 metres west, close to their homes.
Mustafa Al-Shawa was woken at half past two in the morning by gunfire and the rumble of tanks. ‘They moved the yellow line forward to the Sanafour Junction.
‘It used to be up by Al-Shaaf Street,’ he said, pointing to the blocks now sitting near his door.
‘Enough of what is happening to us. Enough of this suffering.
‘With nowhere left to go, leaving would only mean sleeping rough.
‘If we leave the area we’re in now, we’ll end up sleeping in the streets, in filth. There is no place left. Where are we supposed to go?’
The blocks’ move west on Friday, backed by gunfire, tanks and quadcopter attacks, sent dozens of families packing.
They crammed mattresses, furniture, cookware and plastic bins onto trucks or into cardboard boxes and bags.
‘The yellow line has destroyed us,’ one man shouted as he passed.
Like almost all of Gaza, Al-Tuffah is barely standing, every building damaged or destroyed, its paved streets reduced to dirt tracks between mounds of rubble and twisted steel.
‘Last night was very, very bad,’ said Nafiz Al-Ghaz, another resident. ‘Tanks, quadcopters, gunfire. All night they were telling us, “Run, run”. People are fleeing, taking whatever furniture, cupboards and beds they can carry. They placed the yellow line right at the traffic junction.
‘Where are we supposed to go? They might as well throw us into the sea and be done with us.’
Already one of the most densely populated places on earth before Israel’s genocide began more than two and a half years ago, Gaza has been squeezed harder still.
Its nearly two million people are being corralled into an ever shrinking strip of land, every standing structure packed with families while hundreds of thousands shelter in tents and tarpaulin shacks pitched wherever there is room, on streets and squares, in stadiums and along the coast.
‘No one is paying attention to us,’ said Mohammed Khalil, gathering his belongings beside a building in Al-Tuffah, his voice shaking.
‘Every day we wish for death, to be done with this life.’
Israel has broken the ceasefire daily since it came into force, killing more than 1,000 Palestinians and wounding over 3,100 in routine attacks, choking off the aid the deal promised and taking more ground. António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, told the Security Council last week that Gaza still faced ‘profound uncertainty and immense human suffering’.
‘Violence is on the rise, with civilians killed on a daily basis,’ he said.
‘Humanitarian operations remain heavily constrained. Basic human needs, for water, food, shelter and health care, are going unmet. And the Israeli government is declaring its intent to control 70% of the Strip.’
Monitoring of the ceasefire was handed in November to President Donald Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’, authorised by the Security Council.
Hamas said on Sunday that it had delivered a response, coordinated with other Palestinian factions, to a proposal put to it in April by the board’s high representative, Nickolay Mladenov.
Mladenov has looked past Israel’s violations and pressed Hamas to disarm in full, a demand absent from the phase-one deal the movement signed in October.
‘To the world, there is a ceasefire agreement, but in practical terms on the ground, Israel has moved toward a pattern of gradual escalation that reshapes the aggression and reshapes the genocide,’ said Ahmed Al-Tannani, a writer and political analyst in Gaza.
The daily killing around the yellow line, he said, ran alongside the expansion of control, continued assassinations and the bombing of civilians in their homes, and a return to the practice of emptying neighbourhoods before destroying them, including in areas west of the line.
Earlier this month, Israel bombed the Al-Jawazat displacement camp west of Gaza City, killing six Palestinians and wounding 20, one of many strikes far from the yellow line.
‘Attacks are still taking place around us. Here in the Al-Jawazat camp, there have been multiple strikes on tents,’ said Raed Hajjaj, who lives there.
The world’s attention, he said, had drifted. ‘It’s not like before, when massacres were happening continuously and the world’s attention was focused on Gaza.
‘Now, with one or two attacks, the world is occupied with other issues, the US-Iran war, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
‘These things have distracted the world from us.’
The heaviest attacks fall on those living closest to the line, where the military has thrown up 25 kilometres of massive earth berms to cut Gaza in two.
Newly built bases sit atop them like colonial forts, spotlights and watchtowers facing out over the displaced population below.
The Halawa camp in Jabaliya, in the north, lies a few hundred metres from one such base, an Israeli flag flying inside it.
Mohammad Al-Zaghl pointed on Monday to bullet holes torn through the tarpaulin of the makeshift bathroom he had built beside his tent.
‘The Israelis are about 500 metres away from us,’ he said. ‘There is not just one tower, there are one, two, three. From all three directions, we cannot escape the gunfire. Every day there is shooting.’
Displaced from the Jabaliya refugee camp, Al-Zaghl was sitting at the entrance of his tent in January when a burst of fire hit him in the abdomen, leaving a scar along his lower back.
‘Today it is worse than before,’ he said. ‘You hear constant gunfire, explosions, and noise.’
Youssef Shaman, 15, was shot from the same base in March as he went to fetch water.
‘There was a crowd gathered around the water, and they started shooting at us from the tower,’ he said. ‘People were hit, and I was shot in my leg.’
The wound sits on the inside of his thigh, above the knee, an older scar marking where shrapnel struck him in an earlier airstrike that killed his brother.
The shooting from the base, he and other witnesses said, had grown steadily worse. ‘They look for someone to snipe and open fire on them,’ he said. ‘They fire at us all day long.’
Eight months on, Israel has faced no consequences for abandoning the ceasefire, and its violations have only sharpened as it forces Palestinians inward and takes more land.
‘The Israeli occupation still considers the war to be ongoing, and the objectives of the war, linked primarily to achieving the strategic goal of displacing the Palestinian people, are still in place,’ Al-Tannani said.
‘The ceasefire agreement has not brought about any change for the Israeli government.’