When Mahmoud Ghazali recently discussed the prospect of leaving Gaza with his six children, they were “excited” at the idea of finally escaping the relentless war – though his youngest, eight-year-old Nabil, “stunned everyone” by doubting whether they would be alive long enough to get out.
“We are all in despair,” said Ghazali, who had returned to his home in Gaza City during the short-lived ceasefire that Israel broke last month. “I hope we never reach the point when we have to choose between our homeland and our safety.”
Like everyone in Gaza, the Ghazali family is struggling not only with the trauma, hunger and loss caused by 18 months of war. They are reckoning with the prospect of being expelled from their homeland as part of an outlandish plan first proposed by US president Donald Trump and unabashedly embraced by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies.
Condemned around the world as ethnic cleansing, Trump’s suggestion to empty the shattered strip of its 2.2 million people – and rebuild it as the “Riviera of the Middle East” – has been described by Netanyahu as “the only viable plan to enable a different future” for the region.
And since Israel broke the two-month ceasefire with Hamas and relaunched a ferocious offensive, once more driving people from their places of refuge, Gazans fear Israel is putting the plan into practice.
Piling pressure on the population, Israel has blocked the entry of all aid into the territory for more than 50 days; set up a “voluntary emigration unit” encouraging Gazans to leave; and taken nearly a third of the strip as “buffer” zones in which it plans to keep troops even after the war ends.
In escalating the conflict, Israel looks to have the clear backing of the Trump administration. Mike Huckabee, the US’s new ambassador to Israel, dismissed calls to allow aid into the strip by urging the international community to “put the pressure where it really belongs – on Hamas”.
Many Gazans, who had hoped the war would end with a ceasefire and reconstruction, could scarcely have imagined the situation deteriorating further but are suffering the consequences. UN secretary general António Guterres has described Gaza as “a killing field” where civilians are trapped in “an endless death loop”.
Shady Saqr, who is living with his wife and four children in the ruins of their wrecked Gaza City flat, said they had little to eat. His 15-year-old son, Uday, stands in line for hours every day to get water, which he then carries back on a long trudge home through rubble-filled streets.
But Saqr is adamant he will not leave. It is a widely shared stance, with many Gazans themselves the descendants of refugees who fled or were driven from their land during the fighting surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948 – a period Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
“They think we are chess pieces to move around,” Saqr said. “No one is kicking me off my land. Who will bury the bodies of those still under the rubble? I will stay with them whether I am dead or alive.”
Israel says it will continue fighting until it has eradicated Hamas militants and brought back the remaining 59 hostages held by the group, fewer than half of whom are still thought to be alive.
Its military campaign has killed more than 52‚000 Palestinians, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says. Israel launched the offensive in retaliation for the October 7th, 2023 cross-border attack by Hamas, in which the militants killed 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages, according to government figures.
Delegations from both sides have continued limited indirect negotiations as mediators in Qatar and Egypt try – so far in vain – to get agreement on another truce.
Israel’s blockade, which the country says is aimed at undermining Hamas’s control over the population, has had a devastating impact, with supplies of essentials including medicine, clean water and fuel depleted. The World Food Programme said on Friday it had run out of food in Gaza.
Gavin Kelleher, humanitarian access manager with the Norwegian Refugee Council in Gaza, said rising hunger had led to increasing instances of “needs-based looting” as people raid aid stocks. This month a man fired shots in the air at a UN food distribution centre, which was looted and damaged.
As conditions deteriorate, many in the enclave feel their suffering has been forgotten. Kelleher said incidents that would have made global headlines a year ago, “like 100 people killed in a day [or] dozens of children being murdered in military violence”, appeared to have become normalised.
About 70 per cent of Gaza is now under forced evacuation orders by the Israeli military or has been designated no-go military zones, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced. Egypt and Jordan, the two countries mentioned by Trump as destinations for resettling Gazans, have both rejected his plan.
Lina Ahmed, mother of a two-year-old girl, said she was angry at the world for standing by and watching Israel “commit genocide against us”.
“I don’t care if they expel us to Guantánamo. At least there will be meals, water and electricity,” she added. “But if they make it a condition that we can’t come back, I won’t go.” Israel vehemently denies it is committing genocide.
Suhaila Khalil, a mother of four, was displaced earlier in the war to the al-Mawasi coastal encampment, which Israel has designated a “humanitarian area” but repeatedly bombed – setting tents aflame and incinerating their occupants.
The family now spent its days scavenging for wood and plastic to burn as cooking fuel, or searching for food and water while “avoiding bombs”, she said.
Yet Khalil insisted she would never go elsewhere. “We will rebuild everything,” she said. “This is our land ... the blood of tens of thousands of martyrs should not go to waste.” − Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
