For nearly two years of war in Gaza, the civilian population has endured not only relentless bombardment and deprivation, but also a cruel cycle of raised hopes and shattered promises. Time and again, Israel and its allies have offered glimmers of relief – ceasefires, “safe” corridors, or humanitarian aid – only for those hopes to be swiftly crushed in tragedy.
Many observers describe this pattern as a deliberate form of psychological warfare against Gaza’s 2.2 million civilians, aimed at breaking their spirit. As one United Nations expert warned early in the conflict, “there is no safe place in Gaza,” and Israel’s evacuation orders and purported relief measures have often proven to be “a masquerade” masking coercive tactics
Early “safe zones” and broken promises
When the war erupted on October 7, 2023 (after a Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing Israeli onslaught in Gaza), civilians immediately found themselves trapped in an inferno. In the first week, Israel ordered 1.1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza to evacuate south, implying they would be safer there. This directive raised desperate hope for refuge.
Yet even as tens of thousands fled along Israeli-designated “safe routes,” Israeli warplanes struck the convoys. On the very day of the evacuation order, an airstrike killed at least 70 Palestinians on Salah al-Din road – one of the two routes the Israeli military had explicitly told civilians to use. Human rights groups Al-Mezan, Al-Haq, and PCHR concluded that Israel’s evacuation order was never about protecting civilians; it was intended to forcibly displace Palestinians closer to the Egyptian border, in breach of international law.
“The idea that there can be safe zones in Gaza is a masquerade,” one displaced Gazan noted, as even areas in the southern Gaza Strip soon came under continuous bombardment. In short, the war’s first days taught Gaza’s civilians a bitter lesson: official assurances of safety could not be trusted, and no place was truly safe.
Hope rekindled and destroyed
Throughout the conflict, talk of ceasefires and truces has repeatedly kindled hope among war-weary Gazans – hope that is often snatched away. In late 2023, a brief multi-day truce allowed for a hostage-prisoner exchange and a pause in the fighting, leading many families to pray it might extend into a longer peace. Instead, fighting soon resumed with even greater intensity once the deal lapsed, dashing those fragile hopes. A far larger respite came over the winter of 2024–2025: by mid-January 2025, under international pressure, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire that lasted around six weeks. For the first time in months, Gaza enjoyed a “fragile peace and relief,” as bombs fell silent and vital aid trickled in.
That hope evaporated in March 2025. Israel abruptly broke off the ceasefire and unleashed one of the deadliest bombardments since the war’s early weeks. In a single day, over 400 Palestinians were killed, including at least 174 children and 89 women, according to Gaza health authorities. “In shattering the two-month ceasefire… Israel has also smashed the faint hopes that a resolution might remain within reach,” The Guardian observed in an editorial.
It was a horror piled on top of horror: families that had begun to rebuild their lives were thrown back into bloodshed overnight. The Israeli government justified resuming the war by citing Hamas’s refusal to release all remaining hostages, but the timing also coincided with political calculations in Tel Aviv. (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline coalition was faltering; the renewal of full-scale war shored up his far-right partners’ support.)
For Gaza’s civilians, the motives mattered little – the result was another jarring betrayal of hope. “The ceasefire gave us a taste of peace, then it was taken away in an instant,” one Gaza City resident told local media, describing the psychological whiplash as almost unbearable. Notably, even during the ceasefire itself, dozens of Palestinians – especially children – were still dying due to Israel’s tight blockade on food and medicine. The lesson seemed to be that even a truce was not truly life-saving, and its abrupt end made the renewed war feel even more devastating. Many Gazans voiced a grim understanding: every ceasefire or “pause” felt like a cruel tease, a false dawn inevitably followed by deeper darkness.
Aid or cruel deception?
If ceasefire promises have repeatedly collapsed, so too have ostensible humanitarian gestures. Over the course of the war, Israel and the United States have at times touted new plans to address Gaza’s desperate humanitarian situation – plans that often aggravated the suffering on the ground. Nowhere is this more evident than in the saga of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) aid distribution points, which Palestinians have come to bitterly nickname “the killing centers.”
In late May 2025, after nearly three months of total blockade (during which no food, water or medicine was allowed into Gaza), Israel and the U.S. rolled out the GHF food distribution scheme with great fanfare. The stated goal was to bypass Hamas and deliver aid directly to Gazans. Starving families were told that food centers would be established and that they could finally collect essential supplies. After months of hunger, the mere announcement of these distribution points sparked a rush of hope. Thousands of emaciated people walked miles to reach the four designated GHF sites across the enclave. What they encountered was chaos and death.
GHF distribution centers were set up more like military zones than relief sites: each enclosed by fences and barbed wire, with a single entry point and Israeli snipers or private security watching from towers. At appointed times, GHF workers would dump pallets of food on the ground and then open the gates, allowing throngs of desperate people to flood in all at once. The predictable result – perhaps intended result – was mayhem. “The Israeli-U.S. food distribution scheme in Gaza, launched one month ago, is degrading Palestinians by design, forcing them to choose between starvation or risking their lives for minimal supplies,” Doctors Without Borders (MSF) reported in late June.
In just the first month, over 500 people were killed and nearly 4,000 injured at or near these aid centers. By mid-July, the U.N. said at least 875 Palestinians had died trying to get food, with most deaths occurring “in the vicinity of GHF sites”. Many victims were women, children, and the elderly – those least able to withstand a physical struggle for food.
Survivors have described a nightmare scenario that repeats day after day. “A lot of people were getting directly shot at. This is not aid – it’s a death trap,” said Hani Abu Soud, a resident of Khan Younis who survived a distribution event at Al-Mawasi. Israeli forces (and GHF’s armed contractors) routinely fire on the crowds: “If people arrive early and approach the checkpoints, they get shot… If they arrive late…they get shot,” an MSF coordinator explained, noting that every single day their clinics receive patients wounded by gunshots from these sites. Others have been trampled in stampedes or suffocated.
On July 16, for example, crowds gathered at a GHF center in Khan Younis – only to be met with tear gas that caused a panic; at least 21 people were crushed to death or asphyxiated in that incident alone. GHF officials reflexively blamed “armed agitators” in the crowd for provoking chaos, but witnesses and Gaza health authorities vehemently rejected that narrative. According to multiple survivors, American contractors running the site fired tear gas and even live rounds at the throng of unarmed civilians. “We were hungry, we were just trying to feed our children… We do not have money. Death has become cheaper than survival,” Abu Soud said bitterly.
International observers have condemned the GHF aid scheme as a grotesque perversion of humanitarian principles. The United Nations bluntly described the GHF distribution centers as “death traps”, calling their very design “inherently unsafe” and a violation of humanitarian impartiality. MSF went further, labeling the operation “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian assistance”. In effect, Gaza’s civilians were given false hope – the promise of food for their starving children – and then forced into deadly arenas to fight over scraps. “This disaster has been orchestrated… by design,” MSF charged, urging the scheme be dismantled immediately in favor of a proper U.N.-led aid mechanism. Yet, as of July 2025, the GHF sites continue to operate with the backing of the Israeli and U.S. governments. Each new delivery sees the casualty count rise. What should have been a humanitarian lifeline instead feels to many Gazans like a sick trap, one that exploits their hope of feeding their families and turns it into another occasion for mourning.
The weight of death: How rotting bodies break the mind
Beyond bombs and starvation, Gaza’s civilians live surrounded by the dead. As of mid-July 2025, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports over 61,800 Palestinians killed and more than 129,000 wounded since October 7, 2023—most of them civilians, including thousands of children.
Street after street reeks of the unburied dead—corpses trapped beneath rubble, too dangerous or inaccessible for recovery. Families know their loved ones lie beneath dust, but cannot retrieve them; grief becomes suspended, endless. Hospitals overflow. Refrigerators meant for medicine double as makeshift morgues; when electricity fails, bodies swell and rot.
Psychologists working inside Gaza warn that this constant exposure to death and decay is corrosive. Survivors describe nights filled with dreams of the stench of corpses, children drawing images of flies and severed limbs, and adults who can no longer bear the sight or smell of food because death is everywhere. This omnipresent death is not merely incidental—it acts as psychological warfare. The living coexist with the decomposed; dignity dies in death’s shadow. The rotting bodies are not just reminders—they are instruments of despair.
Token gestures and tactical pauses
By the summer of 2025, images of malnourished children and reports of starvation in Gaza began to spark global outrage. In response, Israel and its allies shifted tactics once again – offering small, heavily publicized relief measures, even as the larger machinery of destruction kept grinding on. These gestures, too, have followed the now-familiar pattern: grand announcements followed by underwhelming or even harmful results.
In late July 2025, under mounting diplomatic pressure, Israel announced it would begin airdropping food aid into Gaza and implement daily “tactical pauses” in fighting to facilitate aid delivery. On paper, this sounded like a breakthrough for the starving populace. Israeli officials trumpeted that they had dropped seven pallets of flour, sugar, and canned goods – the first direct Israeli delivery of food to Gazans since the war began. They also promised to restore electricity to one desalination plant to alleviate the water crisis. Many civilians, hearing these announcements, felt a cautious relief: finally, a bit of food and water. “People are happy that large amounts of food aid will come into Gaza,” said one Gaza businessman on July 27, adding, “We hope today marks a first step in ending this war that burned everything up.”
That same day, reality intruded. The initial Israeli airdrop amounted to only seven pallets – “less than a truckload of food”, as one report noted – for a population of over 2 million. Aid agencies blasted the move as wholly “inadequate” and “an Israeli attempt to whitewash a policy of deliberate starvation”. The Israel Defense Forces baldly admitted the airdrops were partly a PR exercise to “refute the false claim of deliberate starvation” (this, as Gazan doctors were reporting dozens of hunger deaths each week). On the ground, the limited “pauses” in fighting and the newly opened aid routes provided only modest relief.
Yes, over 100 truckloads of supplies were allowed in on July 27 – a uptick from previous weeks – but the U.N. noted that Gaza needs 500–600 trucks per day to stave off famine. In other words, the siege was still throttling the territory. Meanwhile, the much-touted humanitarian pauses were confined to a few areas and only 10 hours a day. Israeli forces continued military operations elsewhere and insisted this was not a ceasefire but merely a tactical adjustment.
Crucially, even these baby steps were marred by deadly incidents that turned hope into grief. During the first “pause” day, as crowds gathered along newly designated aid routes, Israeli troops opened fire. At Al-Awda and Al-Aqsa hospitals, medical staff reported that at least 17 people waiting for food trucks were shot and killed by Israeli fire. (The military claimed it had only fired warning shots at “suspects” and was “unaware of any casualties”, a statement met with outrage and disbelief in Gaza.) In another case, 10 people were injured by the very aid being dropped – hurt by falling boxes of supplies parachuted from planes. And while Israel declared certain areas like Al-Mawasi to be safe humanitarian zones, residents soon found those areas weren’t immune from violence either. On the same weekend of the aid push, an Israeli air strike hit a crowded tent camp in Al-Mawasi, killing nine displaced people – tragically undercutting the notion of a “safe” zone for civilians.
“I saw injured and dead people. People have no choice but to try daily to get flour,” recounted a 33-year-old father who went to an aid pickup point amid the so-called pause. By the end of July, the death toll from malnutrition in Gaza had climbed above 130 (over half of them children), and one in five Gaza children was malnourished. Those grim facts speak loudly: the humanitarian measures, while offering slivers of hope, have not stopped the larger scourge of hunger and bombardment. If anything, the intermittent nature of these measures – a day of food here, a few hours of quiet there – serves to illustrate and even amplify the cruelty: Gazans are shown what could alleviate their misery (open crossings, abundant aid, a true ceasefire), yet they are systematically denied the sustained relief needed to actually end the misery.
Beating down a people’s will
Why are Gaza’s civilians being put through this excruciating cycle of false hope? Many analysts, as well as Palestinian leaders, believe these tactics are not accidental byproducts of war, but a deliberate strategy of psychological warfare. The ultimate goal, they argue, is to break the population’s will to resist and even to force them out of Gaza entirely. Indeed, in 2025 Israeli officials have become increasingly open about plans to depopulate Gaza – essentially turning what Gazans experience as “psychological warfare” into literal ethnic cleansing policy.
Israel’s hardline government under Netanyahu, along with key allies in Washington, have floated proposals that would have been shocking – and wholly denounced – in any other context. In early 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump (newly returned to office) stood next to Netanyahu and announced that the United States would “take over” and “own” Gaza after Hamas was defeated, envisioning a “long-term” U.S. stewardship of the territory “after all Palestinians were moved elsewhere.”
Trump spoke casually of moving Gaza’s 2 million people to other countries and turning the strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East” for a new international city – effectively endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land. Israeli leaders eagerly latched onto this vision. By July 2025, Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz revealed a detailed plan to corral all remaining Gaza residents into a sealed camp in the far south (on the ruins of Rafah) as a prelude to mass expulsion. He euphemistically dubbed this tent city a “humanitarian city,” but Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard warned that Katz had laid out “a blueprint for crimes against humanity”.
Under the scheme, Israeli forces would force-march some 600,000 people (mostly those already displaced into the Al-Mawasi area) into the Rafah camp, subject them to “security screening,” and then forbid them from leaving. Ultimately, “the entire population of Gaza would be housed there,” and Israel would implement “the emigration plan, which will happen,” Katz said, according to Haaretz. In other words, once penned in, Gazans would be pressured to “emigrate” out of Gaza en masse. Katz’s briefing was so at odds with international law (forcible transfer of a population is unequivocally a war crime) that it even contradicted the Israeli military’s own public claims that “Palestinians were only displaced inside Gaza for their own protection.”
Yet top Israeli officials, including the Prime Minister, have kept touting depopulation in almost benevolent terms. Netanyahu himself, during a July visit to Washington, spoke of working with other countries on a “better future” for Gaza’s people outside of Gaza – framing it as voluntary relocation if Palestinians “choose” to leave. “If people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave,” Netanyahu said, even as his government made life in Gaza so unbearable that leaving might appear the only viable option. As one Israeli minister cynically put it (after months of siege), “The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative… It’s a demolition site. Virtually every building is down.”. By making Gaza unlivable, Israel is creating that “alternative” in exile.
It is important to note that since the conflict began, Israeli authorities have issued repeated evacuation orders that forced millions of Gazans into perpetual motion—never settled, never safe. Initially, over 1.1 million civilians in northern Gaza were ordered south within just 24 hours, marking the first mass displacement of the war. Over subsequent months, evacuation directives expanded dramatically, eventually covering nearly 83% of the Gaza Strip.
The pace of forced movement only intensified in 2025: from January to mid-year alone, Israel issued at least 35 separate evacuation orders, impacting over one million civilians. This constant churn of displacement isn’t merely chaotic; it’s strategically devastating. By repeatedly uprooting civilians, each new order chips away at their resilience, amplifies their vulnerability, and systematically destroys their hope for stability or safety.
Seen in this light, the cavalcade of crushed hopes over the past two years takes on a sinister coherence. The bombing of evacuation routes, the breaking of ceasefires, the weaponization of aid, the piecemeal pauses that come too little, too late – all serve to send a single message to Gaza’s civilians: no one is coming to save you, no respite will last, your suffering will only deepen. It conditions the population to despair. A people driven to utter hopelessness, it is thought, will be easier to uproot. As a U.N. expert on human rights, Francesca Albanese, warned: Israel appears to be “working to expel the civilian population of Gaza” under the fog of war. The psychological dimension of this – breaking a people’s spirit – is a crucial prelude to physically removing them. Coercive measures have been piled on so thick that any Gazan who “chooses” to flee can hardly be said to do so of their own free will.
Hope as a weapon
In Gaza, hope itself has become a double-edged sword. Every tentative ray of hope that is offered – a humanitarian convoy allowed in, a lull in the shelling, a rumor of truce – seems only to illuminate new heartbreak when it is swiftly withdrawn. This cycle of deceptive hope followed by harsh reality has scarred the psyche of Gaza’s people. It is, as many have noted, a form of collective punishment and control. Each false promise dangles the prospect of relief just long enough to lure people in, only to devastate them again: families gather where food is promised, and loved ones are killed in the gathering; parents dare believe a ceasefire might hold, and their children are slain when the bombs return. This “cruel psychological game” (as a Gaza aid worker described it) sows terror, exhaustion, and fatalism.
For Israel’s war planners – openly aiming to “clean out” Gaza of its residents – such despair is not a regrettable side effect; it is the point. A population that has been starved, bombed, chased from home to home, and tormented with false hope might finally be compelled to give up – to abandon their land in search of life elsewhere. “They are trying to beat people down spiritually so they just leave,” a Palestinian psychologist in Khan Younis observed, noting how many of his patients oscillate between desperate hope and resignation. The events of the past two years bear out this strategy. Hope, ordinarily a lifeline, is turned into a weapon – one that cuts deep into the morale of an already embattled people.
Today, on July 28, 2025, in yet another cruel twist, President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer appeared before the cameras to offer another hollow promise of relief. Trump complained bitterly that the U.S. had given “a lot of money” to Gaza but had received no thanks in return—as if the starving, besieged families should show gratitude amid their suffering. Starmer chimed in vaguely about other nations needing to “step up,” without clarifying exactly what they should step up to do—perhaps clean up the ruins left by Israel and its allies? This surreal performance, coming as Gazans bury yet more of their loved ones, is beyond cynical. It represents a new low in psychological manipulation, a grim punchline in a long, tragic joke inflicted upon the civilian population.
In Gaza, civilians now speak of living in a state of permanent skepticism, where every announcement is met with dread. A ceasefire? “We’ll believe it when we see it hold.” An aid delivery? “It might be a trap.” This is the intended legacy of the psychological warfare being waged: to kill not only bodies, but hope itself. And yet, remarkably, the people of Gaza have not broken – not en masse. In the rubble, under the drones, they still cling to small, stubborn hopes: that the next pause could last, that their children will eat tonight, that someday they can live free in their homeland.
It is this very resilience that Israel’s strategy seeks to extinguish. The world should recognize these cruel manipulations of hope for what they are, and condemn them. For a war that targets the spirit of a civilian population is a war against humanity itself – one that no claimed military aim or “better future” can ever justify.
Conclusion: A different kind of evil
Human beings are capable of horrific acts when consumed by extremes of emotion or stress. We’ve witnessed it in Syria’s deserts, where ISIS burned people alive, and in the dense jungles of Congo, where ADF militants behead Christians. Such acts occur in moments of frenzy and barbarity—conditions that, to some, reveal the darkest impulses of humanity or even the devil’s handiwork. Yet, what is unfolding in Gaza represents a different, more insidious evil. This is cruelty executed in cold blood, planned methodically, strategically refined, and sustained relentlessly over months and years. It suggests something beyond the devil’s impulse—an attempt to surpass him.
We have a profound moral obligation—not only to recognize and condemn this calculated brutality—but to actively stand against it, demanding accountability and justice for Gaza’s besieged civilian population.
