Netanyahu orders Israeli army to seize ‘70% of Gaza Strip’, violating ceasefire deal

October 30th

The news arrives like another card in an endless deck of tragedies, each permutation of violence reshuffling the same elements - land, orders, survival - into configurations we pretend are new. Gaza becomes a city suspended between memory and desire: the one remembered in fragments of olive groves and courtyard songs, the one desired as blank space waiting for new names.

I think of Borges’ story where the cartographers’ map grows so detailed it covers the territory entirely. Now we have the inverse: the territory erased until only the generals’ map remains, crisp lines dividing what cannot be divided. Seventy percent - such clean geometry applied to flesh.

A knight in empty armor gives orders from a settlement perched on stolen hills. His survival depends on squeezing, always squeezing: Hamas, Gaza, history itself until it fits the story he requires. But survival through squeezing leaves nothing but the imprint of fingers on air.

The ceasefire was always a folded paper boat - sober agreement on one side, orders scribbled on the reverse. I hold it up to the light and see both texts bleed through.

Tonight, the moon is a shield polished to blind whoever looks directly at the war. Perseus knew: you carry the horror reflected in bronze, or you become stone.

The combinatorial machine of occupation generates infinite variations: checkpoint, bulldozer, settlement, raid. The system is perfect. Only the people are broken.

The news rattles the bones, even across an ocean. Seventy percent of Gaza. Another bite taken from the land, another turning of the screw. They call it “squeezing Hamas,” but I know what squeezing means. It means the common man, the woman with the empty belly, the child with eyes too old for his years, they are the ones who feel the press.

I’ve seen it, felt it, the slow, grinding weight of power on the powerless. It ain’t about Hamas for them, not truly. It’s about the land, the control, the endless hunger of empire. From the general’s map room, it’s lines drawn, percentages calculated. From the alleyways of Gaza, it’s the specific terror of a door kicked in, the dust of a falling wall in your throat, the cold dread of knowing there’s nowhere left to run.

They speak of “political survival,” this Netanyahu. Survival for whom? Not for the thousands who will be displaced, dispossessed, their meager lives shattered for the sake of a politician’s ambition. The system, it always finds a way to churn human lives into political capital, into territorial gain. It’s not dysfunction; it’s the brutal, efficient design of it all. The body knows this truth, the ache in the joints, the taste of fear. Seventy percent. That’s not a number; it’s a death sentence for a way of life.

The rain on the windowpane at half past three in the afternoon is the only honest thing left in this city of mirrors. I watch it slide down the glass, each drop a small parliament of its own, debating whether to join the others in the gutter or evaporate into the grey air. Netanyahu’s voice, transmitted through whatever contraption they call radio these days, is another kind of rain - harder, more deliberate, each syllable a bullet aimed at a ceiling I cannot see from my third-floor room in Rua da Assunção. The ledger on my desk shows a balance of 127 escudos and 45 centavos, which is less than the cost of a cup of coffee at A Brasileira, and that is the only arithmetic I trust.

I am not moved by this order to seize seventy percent of Gaza. The self that reads the news is the same one that writes it down in a notebook with a broken nib, the same one that will later cross it out with a line so heavy it tears the paper. Another self, the one that does not read newspapers but stares at the damp awning across the street, wonders if the water will ever stop dripping, if the awning will rot, if the shop below will close before the year is out. This second self is quieter, more permanent. It does not care about Hamas or ceasefires or political survival. It only notes the awning, the rain, the ledger, the fact that the tram has just rung its bell three streets away and is now moving north, carrying people whose names I will never know toward destinations I will never visit.

The first self, the one that listens to the radio, feels something like anger, but it is a borrowed anger, a costume hung in the back of a closet and worn only on Tuesdays. The second self, the one that watches the awning, feels nothing at all, which is a kind of feeling too, the most honest kind. Between the two, there is no synthesis, no resolution, only the ledger, the rain, and the damp awning that will still be there tomorrow, still dripping, still indifferent.