The war on Gaza did not begin in 2023. It is the latest chapter in a decades-long campaign to uproot an entire people from their land. What we are witnessing today is not new — it is a continuation of a strategy rooted in history, one that sees Gaza not as a home to over two million Palestinians, but as a problem to be erased.

From the forced expulsions of 1948 to the blood-soaked streets of Khan Younis in 1956, Gaza has endured cycles of violence aimed at its depopulation. Israeli leaders, past and present, have spoken of “voluntary migration” while orchestrating conditions so cruel that leaving becomes a matter of survival. This is not war. It is removal masked as policy. The use of starvation, siege, and relentless bombardment are tools not only of military conquest but of demographic engineering.

Recent declarations by Israeli officials echo the darkest ambitions of their predecessors. The creation of special units to “facilitate emigration,” the open talk of dismantling Gaza entirely, and even foreign proposals for forced resettlement all point to a single objective: to make Gaza disappear. With the world’s gaze often diverted or deliberately muted, the machinery of displacement operates with impunity.

Yet Gaza endures. For all the attempts to drive its people into exile, the land speaks their names. In the ruins of homes, in the classrooms reduced to rubble, in the olive trees still standing — there is resistance. There is memory. And there is an unyielding refusal to be erased.