The Israeli occupation is turning earthen barriers and concrete barricades into new boundaries that are reshaping the Gaza Strip. What were once largely imaginary lines are becoming physical divisions, transforming Gaza into an increasingly constricted and besieged territory.
In mid-January, Israeli forces began constructing an earthen barrier from the Kissufim Corridor in Wadi al-Salqa. It extended north and south alongside what is known as the Yellow Line, eventually forming a barrier approximately 17 kilometres long.
Observers say the barriers did not stop at the Yellow Line. They extended north towards the Netzarim Corridor, passing through Deir al-Balah and the Maghazi and Bureij refugee camps, before continuing south into central Khan Younis and al-Qarara.
Additional barriers, approximately five kilometres long, were also constructed in Beit Lahia. Through this expanding military infrastructure, Gaza is no longer divided only on maps. Its geography is being physically reshaped according to Israeli objectives.
According to an Al Jazeera report prepared by correspondent Abdullah Sukkar, the area available to Gaza’s population has shrunk to approximately 133 square kilometres out of the Strip’s total area of 365 square kilometres, or just 36 per cent.
This means that nearly two million Palestinians are being forced to share this narrow area, placing infrastructure and available resources under pressure estimated at three times their normal capacity.
They are living amid catastrophic humanitarian conditions marked by severe shortages of housing, water and essential humanitarian services.
Systematic Destruction of Urban Life
Writer and political analyst Ahmed al-Tanani warned that Israeli control is not limited to its military dimension.
He said it extends to the systematic and comprehensive destruction of every aspect of urban development in the areas under Israeli control, turning 233 square kilometres into completely devastated zones.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, al-Tanani said this destruction forms part of a strategy designed to “eliminate every foundation of life” and prevent residents from returning to their homes, paving the way for the imposition of settlement projects.
Demographic and Geographic Transformation
Al-Tanani added that the occupation is not merely reducing the available territory. It is also “crowding” two million Palestinians into a confined area where they face the prospect of a slow death.
This is being enforced through restrictions on the entry of reconstruction equipment and raw materials, as well as the spread of disease amid rising temperatures.
Palestinians are therefore being forced into an impossible equation: death either through missiles striking residential areas almost daily or through catastrophic humanitarian conditions lacking water, food and medicine.
Contrary to the Israeli narrative, Israeli affairs expert Suleiman Basharat said Israel views the war on Gaza as an opportunity to impose a complete transformation of the territory’s identity through two interconnected dimensions.
The first is demographic, with forced displacement and expulsion remaining central to the Israeli agenda.
The second is geographic, involving territorial expansion at the expense of Palestinian land and the transformation of Gaza into a gateway for broader access to the Middle East.
Basharat said Israel is exploiting the international focus on the US-Iranian war and global energy concerns to expand its settlement and extermination project under the cover of the ceasefire agreement signed in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh on 9 October 2025.
The agreement, he said, appears incapable of restraining Israeli actions.
He warned that international silence is increasingly approaching a form of complicity, while a religious and biblical discourse is becoming more deeply entrenched within Israeli society to strengthen cohesion around the expansionist project.
Continuing Israeli Violations
Nine months after the signing of the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement to end Israel’s two-year war of extermination against Gaza, the agreement remains stalled in its first phase.
There has been no progress towards the second phase, which would impose clear obligations on the Israeli occupation. Instead, Israel has announced plans for further expansion and a return to settlement activity in the Strip.
Alongside its near-daily violations of the agreement and refusal to fulfil its obligations, Israel has continued moving the Yellow Line westward.
As a result, it now dominates an estimated 70 per cent of the Gaza Strip, even though the agreement set out a path for Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza and promised the territory’s reconstruction.
Since the ceasefire began, Hamas says it has fully complied with all of its provisions. Israel, however, has killed 1,122 Palestinians and wounded 3,599 through air strikes and gunfire, according to figures from Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
On Tuesday, Gaza’s Government Media Office announced that the occupation had committed 3,689 violations of the ceasefire agreement.
It said only 58,664 trucks had entered the Gaza Strip out of the 165,000 that were supposed to have entered by this point, representing a compliance rate of no more than 35 per cent.
