Eternal Borders and the Territory of the Gaza Strip

23. The smoke that the world watched rising form the pulverized dust of concrete buildings n the confines of the walls built to contain Gaza seem a distant reflection of 330,000 truckloads of sand, dirt and rocks that were removed to build the forty mile barrier around Gaza that seemed a boast of the inability of cross-border attacks in the past. To be sure, this dust is of construction of concrete warren of tunnels, in part, and of the concrete buildings and indeed old stone structures that are still standing on the Gaza City and across the strip. But might one not see them as the issuing of the excavated sands that made way for the barrier wall, the very structure that has delimited the well-mapped range where Israeli bombs have targeted in what is argued pin-point fashion the pockets of resistance where Hamas has situated itself in the Gaza Strip, in maddening proximity to Israel?

Smoke Rising from Israeli Airstrikes on Gaza City/Atia Mohammed/Flash 90

If we risk embodying the tragedy and human devastation of Gaza in timeless terms, by an iconography of timeless images of a sacred passion as much as a real-time event, the rising clouds of dust that photographers captured in the opening days of the onslaught may best capture the real fears of obliterating any future in the flattening the city, and the fatal difficulty of gaining distance on the heated conflict, and the importance of trying to place it in a context that will allow some road toward a more livable future if we want one to exist.

Mohammed Salem/Reuters

If these walls are about the persistence of memory, the towering columns of smoke and ash that are rising as spectral clouds above Gaza and Gaza City are the results of bombs said primarily to target the persistence of an underground network of tunnels beneath the city that were built as a hidden infrastructure to link across other boundaries. They reveal the truly transnational of the conflict, that is far more than a battle about walls, if it began from them. The clouds that are rising from the destroyed buildings of the city are refracted in light of a setting sun. The clouds of sediment refraction sunlight are hardly natural, a poignant picture the expansion of retributive violence of the moment that threatens to burst across borders in more explosive ways. If the brutal scale of violence in Gaza seems to proceed with a logic that it is contained to the Hamas targets that are deemed contained, its violence is impossible to process.

How to react, and how to contain one’s own reactions to these images, and to the fears of what is unfolding on the ground? The pathos of the human stories that are on the ground more effectively, but may freeze us in speechless awe before a Pietà, capturing a conflict with apparent timelessness that demands humanitarian resolution in the present. The anguish of victims–here being ready to be taken to the Al Shifa hospital after hit in a refugee camp west of Gaza City named Al Shati–must be embodied, as their pain and their geography, but the loss of home is what cannot be forgotten, and even more compelling. But how to map home? “Nach House!–du wunderbares Wort,/du machete das Herz mir schwa. . . . nun has ice keens mehr.” One hardly needs the words of a woman written in Thereisenstadt who died in Auschwitz to remind us. But maybe that, as if we needed Ilse Weber (1903-1944) to remind us, is the largest part of the problem. This is not, however, about religion at all, as much it involves relgious rhetoric, and is, inevitably, centered around Jerusalem.

Samar Abu Elouf/New York Times

24. Jewish American poet Harvey Shapiro–no friend of settlements, if a deep friend of Israel–escaped a liturgical tradition, and sung of both sunsets and the firmament, from the fate of remembering to the pleasures that pollution might bring in the spectrum of red of a chemical sky over Manhattan from his Brooklyn home. But he would shudder at the incongruity of eery quiescent images of sunsets refracted through the bombing of airstrikes on Gaza City. Shapiro felt dread at “these days of seeing everything/in its extenuating global context” in the Iraq War, when bombing was discussed with a combination of abstraction and resoluteness not seen since Vietnam. He might rightly ask what sort of repentance is possible before the Gates of Atonement close after war crimes on such a scale of obliteration already underway in Gzza.

This eery reflection of sunset is not refracting pollution above New Jersey, but the aura of those bombs illuminates heady fears of a global threat of unrestraint violence spreading along the actual borders of the Israeli state. The pulverization of bombed out buildings in a preamble, one fears, to an inevitable ground assault already stationed at Gaza’s borders by troops “all ready” to enter those borders–if further aerial bombardment won’t first prepare for their arrival. Rather than a war that is fought on or fought around frontiers, this is a war fought across them as much as over them, against the underground tunnels of Gaza City where rockets were stored, and with far less sense of defending rights to territoriality as of denying them–this is perhaps a war of post-territoriality, as much as pesudo-territoriality, fought not about territory, but denying them.

We have wrongly persisted in seeing the conflict of Gaza as local, as part of an eternal struggle, but it is rooted in a new dynamic of barrier building and securitized defense. If it is to some extent a reflection of the current rage for wall-building and the security systems on which the sense of Israeli security has devolved, it is a war of global geopolitics, not only in terms of Middle East alliances of Saudi Arabia and Israel, but the investment of America in the pattern of wall-building and the refusal to build routes of safe passage to connect Gaza to the Palestinian controlled lands.

Although walls have increasingly constrained movement of all Palestinians, the constraining of movement is however greatest around Gaza, as is the extent of the militarization of the wall, and the promise of providing the most effective new standard of wall-building–a “wall of sensors, iron, and concrete,” not actually made of iron, but acting as a mythic Iron Wall, extending forty meters underground that was inaugurated in December 2021–and whose engineering has seemed, two years later, to have provided the prime basis to stage an invasion of Israeli territory by disabling its sensors, that was intended as a decisive counter-measure to the ability of Hamas militants to cross into Israeli territory, by depriving the ability of tunnel-building in an impregnable structure of 140,000 tons of iron and steels across the 65 km border

Israeli Defense Minister Celebrating the Inauguration of a Gaza Border Wall, December 7, 2021/Ammar Awad 

The conflict in Gaza is transnational not only because of the funding it has received from Islamic states. It embodies the dangers of the spread of a level of violence explosively rapidly spinning out to multiple other fronts to destabilize a region whose sense of security and stability was for far too long based only on the construction of security walls. If the territory was excluded from Israel’s boundaries as a critical remainder of land, destroying the built-up areas of the Gaza Strip seems akin to an annulment of memories, outside of the requisite window for rethinking the arraangmen, as if the no-go perimeter where numerous civilian casualties and death could contract.

United Nations, Office of Huamnitarian Assistance

The current invasion not only breached in ways that could not be imagined the “state-of-the-art” barrier equipped with sensors to detect underground tunnels, cameras, and radar systems which was seen as an “iron wall” to ensure the “ongoing normalcy of life,” dramatically expanding the threats that Hamas rockets and drones posed in the past, when they were seen as able to be intercepted by lasers, but ended any sense of “normalcy” in ways that have led to a retributive targeting of the secret systems of weapon production in Gaza that seem to have occurred under Israeli eyes, if with funding from foreign states with far more money than the Gaza authorities. If the rockets that Hamas fired from Gaza were of a far greater range than previous, either constructed in underground tunnels in Gaza or smuggled into Gaza in underground networks of tunnels, and indeed fired rockets form civilian areas, mostly in the Shuja’iya neighborhood of Gaza City, that blur the division of military and civilian space in ways that have been repeatedly raised as a feature of the current war.

Sites Israeli Defense Forces Have Targeted in the Shuja’iya District of Gaza City

The IDF targeting of buildings around Gaza City seen by satellite reveals a clearly sustained targeting of aerial bombardment that systematically continued through October 12, 2023 around Gaza City, as if intelligence revealed clear hideouts of Hamas that the IDF might target on its peripheries, intensely around Beit Hanoun, a city Hamas administered, a site that Israeli forces have intensely shelled and targeted, not only because of its proximity tothe border, but the warren of underground tunnels. Even under a site of high population density, as well as a hospital, the tunnels first targeted as they were discovered in the 2014 Gaza War, when the IDF first grasped their scale and intent as a massive project of boring of tactical construction as a path to Israeli territory led to an intensified depth of the iron border wall. If Israelis had seen the targeting of underground tunnels before, destroying over thirty of tactically constructed tunnels Hamas built in the Shuji’ya district, over twenty meters beneath city streets, often tied to hospitals–

–the warren has been undoubtedly expanded as an underground tunnel network concentrated in North Gaza, their impermeability evolving to escape detection even with reinforced walls, railroad tracks and soldiers, as their past origin as a conduit for smuggling arms may have only been sharpened a military focus and rationale. The IDF must have detected the sophisticated network that was already laying the groundwork for a projected violent surprise attack of the outlying settlements–extending through and almost as far beyond the three km buffer zones–as the groundwork for territorial reclamation and liberation of Palestine, shrouding their murderous plans in a language of righteous liberation. The bombing of the tunnel network led Israel to be accused of war crimes after shelling killed 20 refugees in a UN-run school in 2014, in Jabaliya, home to 120,000, that killed children as they slept and others who returned home from prayer. Despite the tanks who fired the shells receiving mortar fire back from the very same position, the war crimes of wounding and killing children

Beyond the thirty tunneled underground shafts from Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun destroyed but the IDF ten years ago, the intensified building of more tunnels have grown in parallel to and in response to the engineering of the border wall, it seems, nurturing planning of attack strategies and dreams of destruction that sprung from underground to the surface on October 7. IDF soldiers have remained outside of Gaza’s walls, nominally respecting its territorial limits and bounds, as Israeli bombs have claimed to be primarily destroying the underground tunnel network that stored the missiles and also enabled the attack–the invisible underground network–a transnational network targeted by Israeli bombs, to prevent from destruction from emerging again. The premeditated violence of these attacks and the evidence of the bodies of the dead emphasize a call for retributive destruction of the infrastructure that enabled this beast to have emerged amidst alleged normalcy. Moloch, moloch, moloch besmeared with blood.

Cross-Border Tunnels Destroyed in the Gaza War of 2014

The IDF which I was asked to pray has systematically targeted all sites of alleged hideouts and tunnels in Gaza City. The sites from which rockets were launched on the outskirts of Gaza City, they have become the targets of bombs, even when violating human rights and principles of ethical war. The war has exploited the pseudo-territoriality of the Gaza Strip, whose bounds are not defensible boundaries, but imposed boundaries. The bounds were barriers across which combat fighting was tolerated but seemed to be controlled. While the government focussed on a tunnel-detection networked for the previous ten years since this network was destroyed, the question of mapping the expanded network from the shafts of cities like Beit Hanoun received significant bombing to reduce concrete shafts and tunnels, as if the a hidden beast from the ground might be buried by sufficient bombs. This is not a religious war, if it is often cast in sacred terms: until the transnational network of tunnels that have incubated such an unforeseen resurgence of collective memory that seems to have been consigned to oblivion, the long-hidden network of incubation demands to be consigned to an earlier archeological era Moloch indeed.

This violation of the border was a nightmare, or a realization of longstanding nightmares of postwar Europe, since the state’s founding. But it is hard not to imagine how much more real the unimaginable has become with the intensive focus on that line as an edge of settlement, an edge within which settlements and refugee camps were tolerated, and allowed to exist for something substitute for truly humanitarian grounds, and the symbolic fetishization of that edge as the basis for Israel’s survival. For the edge has become a crucial symbolic imaginary from 2012, as the Gaza security barrier was enforced to control and police the movement of people and goods. In response, the military that includes cybersecurity has grown rapidly.

25. As the Strip was defined by the perimeter fence that the strategic operations of Hamas succeeded in breaching, incapacitating its surveillance apparatus in remarkably systematic and economic fashion, and gruesome if not almost mechanic results, to evade the towers that had symbolized their restriction of movement. While it may seem rather crude and politically loaded to suggest that the elevation of the border barrier as an edge precipitated the careful plotting of its crossing–knocking out security observation towers to debilitate them and work to destroy communications servers, allowing some Gazans to stream across the border barrier, looting what they could; others attacked residents of kibbutzim as rapidly and indiscriminately as possible. The dangers of forced migration of Palestinian residents of Gaza southwards–to a region of far fewer housed or homes–is inhumane, impractical, and evocative of precedents of forced migration of slaves, prisoners of war, or Armenians in preparation for a genocide or mass atrocities.

New York Times Graphics

The containment of motion in Gaza–restricting even water, a necessity given absent clean aquifers in the region–demands a new logic than the logic of trusting an “Iron Wall.” The inevitable focus on the edge of the Gaza Strip has obscured the interests of the region’s residents–and curtailed any possible future whose logic was not focussed on clear-cut territorial divides. As Hamas’ military potential grew, its “zeal” was increasingly defined in relation to the border barrier, did the counter-intelligence and funding that led to firing over 2,500 missiles across the wall into Israeli territory, and then a further 5,000 to shock nearby villages and the military. The strategic intentional disabling of the communication servers on which the wall infrastructure–constructed after the military operations of shelling that were called “Operation Protective Edge” from 2014 and hailed as a needed protective barrier–has been an edge of Gaza that has constrained its future. But the performance of an illusion of “normalcy” led eyes to be taken off the ground, as if the situation was indeed sustainable and under control.

If it was argued to have been a solution that guaranteed “normalcy,” the mindset of a contained problem did not allow but in a very macabre and unintentional way facilitated the utterly gruesome spectacle that began with the exultant and apparently improvised array of para-gliders, motorbikes and four-wheel drive vehicles that overwhelmed Israeli Defense Forces as they tore through an “Iron Wall” far less physically or psychically monumental with construction equipment.  The ecstatic and almost ritualized uninhibited orgiastic violence that followed was evil, but reacted to its imposed constraints and the apparent absence of an honest broker, with the absence of guarantees of safe passage routes that were proposed since 1999 now being to be agreed upon to prevent violence against hostages.

While boundary barriers that surround the Gaza Strip have been prioritized to create one of the Palestinian areas of autonomous rule that was born around Israeli territory in the Oslo Accords, the enclaves that have become dotted with refugees, and creating areas of increasing mental health crises and psychic travail, even before hospitals were flooded with injured from aerial strikes. That has been ignored, as the confines of Gaza continue to be elevated in the symbolic imaginary, rather than the inhabitants of the strip and their survival. And while the quick comparison that Zelensky drew between Hamas members’ bloody incursion into the Israeli borders with the incursion of Putin’s Russia into Ukraine might have raised eyebrows, given the massive size of the Russian mobilization and the small but effective onslaught of missiles that allowed Hamas to pierce the cordon sanitaire Israel drew around its territory in response to Palestinian violence from 2010. Far from offer routes, walls have multiplied that have redefined the state and status quo.

The demand to use Gaza as a launching pad for “liberating” Palestinian land grew at the same time as the edges that the nation has increasingly viewed itself were expanded to ensconce the nation safely behind walls for over a decade–accelerating the project of an attack that might be able to pierce the structure. For the battle was waged not about land, or territory, primarily, so much as the penetration and targeting of the wall itself as a means of launching what must have been planned as an increasingly violent onslaught against Israel.

Security Barriers Built on Israels’ Borders in 2012/The Guardian

–the breakthrough of those edges occurred with a similarly horrific manner of wanton violence.

The similarity he detected in how a denial of sovereignty was delivered death to citizens’ bodies staged an uncannily similar theater of intimidation, only able to be imagined as retributive violence and inculcated as a deeply existential animosity an outsider cannot know. This is the new world of the border as absolute edge. The violence that broke through the Gaza border, and now stands in danger of multiplying to a multi-front war, can be mapped in terms of the violent breaches of Gaza’s borders, with an array of means from rockets to jeeps to hang-gliders, to a series of bulldozers. In breaking through a barrier that was vaunted as impenetrable and led bulldozers to plough through the two fences that had previously been a site of protest, the fears of breaking through the boundary led to a savage rage of killing that not only met the deepest nightmares of a vicious massacre, but destabilized the country in ways that may lead to a two-border war.

For the disorienting nature of bursting through the barrier has dizzyingly spun into an aerial barrage of warfare that has stands to unfold into a threat from multiple sides of the Israeli state, piercing through the fences that Israeli forces have built around the community with a violence that dismantled the security wall for over twenty years surrounded and effectively silenced the Gaza Strip for “security ends”–

–have no doubt distanced the fact that this was a fence of truly dystopian proportions of significantly upwards of 150,00 tons of iron and steel, surveillance apparatus including cameras and sensors on the very observation towers, that were destroyed by the first rockets and airplane fire.

Middle East Eye

26.  If by no means the only celebrated barrier Israel has built–nor the first, the wall between Israel and the West Bank, the breaching of the wall that has stood since it was built twenty-one years ago, with claims that it was needed to prevent Palestinians from crossing, also cuts into Palestinian land, as the wall between Jerusalem and the West Bank, as necessary for state security.  Celebrated as invincible, the wall that cost of over $1.1 billion seemingly bracketed the issue of Gaza–if the UN ominously predicted life would be unlivable for Gaza’s population by 2020 twenty years earlier, creating a sort of timeline for the consequences of curtailed access to electricity, clean drinking water, and an unforeseen epidemic of mental health. If the walls have isolated the Gaza Strip from Israeli’s minds, the barrier reduced the area of farming in the Gaza Strip and fenced it in, and created a new target around which a generation of struggles for borders would intensify.

While diagrams of the engineering of these walls has been common knowledge, the recent revelations that security apparatus was disabled–as well as the monitoring of the breakthrough of the barrier–by insider knowledge of the nerve center of the security apparatus, controlling communications along the barrier suggests how much the focus on a barrier’s strength avoided how surprisingly easy it might be to attack and undermine as a protection once plans for its operational monitoring were known: the barrier, treated as some sort of living or cyborgian presence, could be programmed as its critical links were found, and the cyclone fence cut through and swept aside by a hack of drones and bulldozers that hardly seemed military weapons or weapons-grade material. Effectively disabled, the billion-dollar security bonanza of such great investment and defensive hopes was rendered more IKEA than defensive.

As much as the breaches have focussed on the wall, the “security” barrier begun with fanfare and potlatch expenditure in 2002 paralleled a new strategy of isolation, including a naval blockade at sea to restrict fishing rights off the Gaza coast, a significant if neglected blockade to circumscribe not only sea-acess but served to limit access most of the larger fish–tuna or mackerel–of higher nutritional value that feed lying over ten nautical miles from shore–a limit heavily patrolled by the Israeli Navy, which in 2014 had curtailed the limit to six nautical miles in ways immediately felt by Gaza’s fisherman and inhabitants’ dining tables.

Permissible Fishing Area, 2019

To be sure, the area of Gaza is both larger than the area of the land surface, and the war is being waged around the underground channels of attack and of storing–if not fabricating–weapons that are deep underground, an area of tunnels where the claims to the arms of defending Palestinian territoriality have, one might argue, been forced.

Undoubtedly the violence of the cross-border vulnerability that the piercing of the border line that has been seen as a need of safety with a savagery that has reflected if perhaps magnified the confines around Gaza, in which the absence of management of affairs has grown increasingly challenging, and desperate. If Hamas, a social safety organization at one time that has morphed into a pseudo-state authority and to a transnational state as it has identified itself with terrorist attacks, effectively without ability to police its boundaries–or ability to integrate itself within other nations as it is increasingly committed to Israel’s destruction–has attacked the effective surrounding villages that have grown up on the other side of the border wall, as populations around the “border barrier” have grown, creating greater intensity of troubles, but the border wall trusted to be a bracketing of sorts of the Palestinian presence that the Israel never fully addressed.

Populations Vulnerable to Attacks in and Around Gaza Strip/New York Times/Mapbox

The maps of the population centers vulnerable to risks from war in the region are disproportionately within the walls, perhaps, if the targets of the cross-border violent invasion were aimed at the sense of settler towns that ringed the region, towns that were made into surrogates of the government that built the “security” wall as many of their inhabitants were inhumanely and inexcusably attacked and slaughtered, angry at the security that had been prioritized around them, as the security wall bracketed out of mind its inhabitants.

The security wall extends into Gaza’s “territory” by a thousand meters, reducing their confines and carving up farmlands and territorial claims, as much as the bleak walls have crated a state of fears of siege that have only magnified, and allowed seemingly functional settlements to proliferate across the border wall in nearby towns. The positive growth of settlement around better areas, lying just outside of the protective circumscribed no-go areas around the barriers behind which Gazans languished, was no doubt tormenting to those inside. When was it imagined as a such hateful target of violent and bloody wrath?

New York Times

But the creation of borders around the Israel state’s actual and claimed borders deemed deterrents against terrorism and illegal infiltration, often lattice steel topped with razor wire, are, in many ways, the prototypes of the walls that have been built globally around nations, discussed at length in this blog and elsewhere, but may have begun as a “national mental illness” in Israel by 2012, built by subcontractors and immigrants.  It fostered a nation wrapped in a security boundary for over a decade; fortified fences have concretized trigger warmings, naturalizing defensive apparatus built by the Defense Forces; the wall embedded with new technology of surveillance was celebrated as “a wall of iron, sensors and concrete between it and the residents of the south,” as former Minister of Defense Benny Gantz affirmed. It however created a sort of prison for the amazing density of about 5,5000 per sq km, who are now told to evacuate the densely inhabited area of Gaza City and relocate south in forced migration. ”Civilians of Gaza City evacuate south for your own safety and the safety of your families,” the IDF warned, in a pretense of civility or lawfulness, inviting Palestinian residents “distance yourself from Hamas terrorists who are using you as human shields.” While distinguishing their enemies from Palestinians, that distinction was increasingly lost.

Even if the wall surrounding Gaza is not prominent in the map before which the IDF commander spoke, the focus on the land from which terrorists staged attacks on the security wall was a terrifying reawakening of vulnerability. The project of wall=building to which tbe IDF has become dedicated is a logic without future. If it has sought containment–a resurrected strategy of the old Cold Warriors in the United States–as if the best options were a status quo. The American surface-to-air missile defense system, known as the Iron Dome, offered a system to maintain a status quo by deterrence as if it was a detente. But a defensive posture of containment never engaged the problems of those living on the ground–or a humanitarian solution. Ganz was echoing the rhetorical assurance that Benjamin Netanyahu would promise were provided by the wall.

27. And so it goes. The expansion of a logic of fences had begun as Operation Defensive Shield included a strengthened wall and barrier around the Gaza Strip would create a false sense of security, reinforced by the investment in the Iron Dome antimissile protection devices, responding to how Hamas turned to firing missiles across the wall. The wall became the new battle-front, if you will, and the target to pierce and to attack, as the constraints grew on increasingly intense confines of overpopulated areas. This sacrificed the future to a logic of containment and isolation that the current bombing of the northern region of Gaza City where Hamas may be concentrated that may kill hundreds of thousands, as IDF has warned “Gaza City is an area where military operations take place” in no uncertain terms, as soldiers congregated outside of Gaza’s demarcated borders.

It is not clear what the logic is here: one hopes it is not the uprooting and destruction of a dehumanized population that is being stripped of all rights in retribution. Is the demand to “move south” and below the Wadi Gaza a hope that the hundreds of thousands find shelter in the sparsely settled South, hoping that they might be expected to invade the northern area of Gaza City. its structures were already heavily bombed and continuing, as Netanyahu told the nation, on the Sabbath eve, “only the beginning” of a campaign “Our enemies have only begun to pay the price”?

The threat is ominous, but the panic sewn follows a logic of penning in and controlling the population, without taking much of a future into sight. This was not about territoriality, or allowing a solution of territorial configuration, but about using the wall as a basis to launch an attack strategy, which would be supposedly not targeting civilians, although many civilians may have no clear sense of where to go. The image of Israel sending populations across borders, to refugee camps, disturbed.

When Gaza citizens were directed “to move to the area south of the Wadi Gaza, as shown on the map,” and at the same time to recognize that “the Hamas terrorist organization waged a war against the state of Israel,” as much as against the barrier wall, the apparent hope was to flatten the areas from which Hamas was said to have staged its advances against the constraints on Gaza’s populations, by placing the pragmatics of their own protection and safety over their political representation, to view it as discredited, without a clear future map.

Washington Post

But the logic of the perimeter, and of the fence, dictated the brutality of the forced migration that was ancillary to the bombing raids of the tunnel network of the north. The imaginary targeting of Hamas terrorist network, as if it was the prime inhabitant of the city, and as if the terrorist group that attacked Israeli territory was acting as the only representative of the city, might be better mapped as the huge health atrocity of displacing residents’ access to health care after forced mobility into an “evacuation zone” that was far from health care in a time of war. If the resulting concentration of populations at a remove from access to hospitals in Southern Gaza is inevitably pronounced,–access to hospitals was concentrated in the densely populated evacuation area, as one might expect, that has been targeted by arial bombardment–

–the deteriorating situation of health after four hospitals in Northern Gaza and twenty hospitals that had earlier capably served two thirds of the population of the Gaza Strip were asked to shutter their doors and cease functioning. The massive evacuations ordered for the critically ill, newborn infants, and displaced wounded reated a situation of public health emergency, as the far more limited health infrastructure of Southern Gaza, from hospitals to clinics, below the line of the evacuation zone, will be asked to accommodate an unprecedented doubling in population. The resulting map, created by OSM mappers and the open source app n CityAccessMap, with data from the Palestinian Governate, suggests the deep risks for the continued bombardment and forced migration across the perimeter bound by Israeli security walls, and the inadequate attention to or infrastructure for a massive forced displacement into the sparsely settled south.

Mapbox/Open Street Map Contributors/Jeremy Scott Diamond and Michael Ovaska/Bloomberg News

This is the crisis of public health at which we are only at the beginning, public health crises across borders, that will begin from compelling forced migrations across borders with forced geographic mobility, compelled to move by military force.