🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
In the final days of the Biden administration, Benjamin Netanyahu's government in Israel and what remains of Hamas in Gaza have reached a ceasefire deal that will take effect on Sunday. The details, as of this writing, remain unclear. But suppose that, as is widely expected, 33 Israeli hostages are returned in exchange for between 900 and 1,500 Palestinians and a temporary ceasefire. Suppose that the permanent ceasefire stage sketched out in today's deal is also reached within a few weeks, and Israel stops leveling buildings in Gaza, bombing medical facilities, and blocking international food and medical aid. What then?
Among the parade of mass atrocities involving systemic bombing of civilian residential areas in the 21st century, from Darfur and Syria to Mosul and Ukraine, Gaza stands out in this terrible respect: ordinary non-combatants cannot even leave the war zone. Like the half-million civilians remaining in Stalingrad when it was surrounded by Nazi forces, Gaza's residents are stuck within a siege, unable even to flee from the ruins to save their lives.
Gaza is home to four times the population of WW2-era Stalingrad. But just like the victims of the German siege, many in Gaza are now starving. Gaza, as Doctors Without Borders put it, is a "death trap." The death toll among ordinary Gazans is immense, if hard to estimate.
It is hard to see any viable long-term future for 2.2 million or more Palestinians in Gaza. Their cities lie in utter ruin; over half the buildings are too dangerous to occupy, or are now just piles of rubble. People are huddling in unstable apartment blocks missing exterior walls as the winter months roll on. The economy is almost nonexistent; most hospital services are nonfunctional. There is no way for children to get to school, or for teachers to be paid. Most roads are impassable; most power and sewer infrastructure is gone. Israel has intentionally destroyed basic water utilities. Even if a $40 billion fund to rebuild Gaza suddenly materialized, it would be one to two decades before Gaza became livable again.
This harrowing reality is not comprehended by many Israelis, whose government has prevented journalists from entering Gaza and censored reporting on the sheer scale of the destruction. American coverage has also been distorted by a massive campaign aimed at demonizing any and all critique of Netanyahu and his Likud Party as antisemitism. The systemic effort to suppress criticism by equating protesters with terrorists, doxxing students, and scaring college officials into compliance has led to widespread underestimation of how dire the post-war situation is likely to be. Thus many Americans imagine, at least tacitly, that once a permanent ceasefire takes hold, everything will eventually be okay.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Israelis will not pay to rebuild Gaza unless extreme economic and military pressure from developed nations force them to do so.
Moreover, any right-wing government in Jerusalem, whether led by Netanyahu or not, will probably occupy a half-mile-wide or more strip in northern Gaza for the foreseeable future, declaring it a new "buffer zone." It will maintain its longstanding total embargo on Gaza's seacoast ports. It will tighten even further its total control of everything and everyone entering Gaza, now including the southern crossing from Egypt.
In this situation, Gazans seem destined to subsist in utter destitution, eking out survival from foreign food aid, cooking on makeshift fires, scavenging in the endless rubble, and slowly dying from malnutrition and untreated medical conditions of all kinds—including after-effects of hasty amputations and unimaginable mental trauma. If the world community allows this to happen, the death tolls among those still trapped within Gaza could become enormous over the next few years.
Joe Biden's ceasefire plan also includes hazy gestures towards a future government for Gaza not including Hamas. The UAE, a major broker in the talks, has insisted on a role for a reformed Palestinian Authority, which few Gazans may welcome.
One must give outgoing Secretary of State Anthony Blinken credit for trying, but it would take a large coalition of nations with a plan for a two-state solution to rebuild a viable Palestinian government for Gaza and the West Bank. As there is no movement at all in that direction, whatever meager governing authority emerges within Gaza's post-apocalyptic conditions is likely to be weak and unable to prevent militant groups from future recruiting.
There may, then, be no humane alternative except for most Gazans to emigrate. For many Palestinian families already displaced in previous generations, it would be a very bitter pill to accept exile from the homes they had made in Gaza, despite intermittent bombings over the two decades since Israel pulled out in 2005. But things are so bad in Gaza now that those who want to leave the mass rubble tombs made by Netanyahu should be enabled to depart.
The problem with that last-ditch solution is that there is nowhere for Gazans to go. Israel would never allow hundreds of thousands of Gazans to move into the West Bank, where right-wing settlers have been driving Palestinians out of hillside farms and into overcrowded cities for decades. In those very cities, Israel has also bulldozed entire downtown business districts—with over 1,500 Palestinian-owned structures destroyed just in 2024—and bombed neighborhoods in which handfuls of militants are detected (as they would be in any mass of people this oppressed for three generations).
Egypt and Jordan could take in much of Gaza's population, but would never agree to more than a few thousand. Aside from domestic tensions that any large influx from Gaza would cause, their governments do not want to legitimize further ethnic cleansing by the Likud and its hard-right allies. Lebanon might be more pliable. But it is poor, unstable, and already hosting hundreds of thousands of new Syrian refugees. And Lebanon and Jordan already harbor roughly 2.8 million Palestinian refugees.
And it goes without saying that the U.S., Canada, Britain, and most EU nations would face extreme public backlash if they offered asylum to even a few thousand Palestinians from Gaza. Donald Trump, we can be sure, would not take a single one. While a few South American nations might be willing to accept small numbers of Gazan refugees, there is no developed democratic country that would do for Gazans what Germany did when it took in over a million refugees from Syria's civil war.
Thus there may be no escape at all for the people trapped in the hell on Earth that Netanyahu and Hamas together, like two dancers in a macabre death show, have made. Gaza might look much the same a decade from now as it does on the day the bombing finally stops—minus the northern strip that Israel takes and turns into a new Maginot Line. Gaza's slowly dwindling population may limp on from year to year in makeshift camps fed and served by charities that can do nothing to rebuild the shattered infrastructure, or provide a semblance of normal life.
Even with a ceasefire, Gaza will remain a Mad Max world for over two million human souls. Its children, receiving little formal education and having witnessed horrors beyond description, will face a future utterly without hope. In Gaza, the emptiness of all the West's promises, and the hypocrisy of proclaimed human rights standards, will remain on display for the world to see.
John Davenport is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Peace and Justice Studies at Fordham University.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
