The Awful Truth About Gaza Before October 7
Following is a guest essay from Yumna Zahid Ali, Karachi, Pakistan.
Before October 7
The insistence that the war began on October 7, 2023, is not a neutral act of historical framing; it is a narrowing of history that carries political consequences. By compressing decades of domination into a single date, an ongoing system of control is recast as an isolated eruption of violence. This framing does more than simplify memory…it shields long-standing structures of militarization, siege, and war economies from sustained scrutiny. When history is reduced to a moment, accountability dissipates, and structural violence is rendered invisible.
Gaza is not merely a site of recurring conflict. It is a manufactured space of containment, produced through a political economy of occupation, blockade, and militarized governance. For over seventy-five years, Palestinian life in Gaza has been shaped not only by catastrophic bombardments but by continuous systems of dispossession, enclosure, and enforced dependency. These conditions did not emerge in 2023; they were built incrementally through policies that fused military control with economic restriction.
The mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948 created not only a refugee crisis but also an enduring framework of economic vulnerability. Gaza became a compressed territory of displaced populations denied land restitution, mobility, and economic sovereignty. Refugeehood was not treated as a temporary emergency but institutionalized as a managed condition. Over time, this produced a population structurally constrained in its ability to exercise political agency, economic autonomy, and long-term planning. Gaza’s economy was never allowed to develop independently; it was shaped to remain precarious, restricted, and externally governed.
Following Israel’s occupation of Gaza in 1967, military authority expanded beyond security concerns to regulate daily life and survival. Borders, labor access, trade routes, and movement were placed under external control. Control over mobility translated into control over livelihoods; control over borders became control over existence. What was often described as economic “collapse” was, in practice, a reconfiguration into dependency. Insecurity became a governing instrument…produced, managed, and redistributed to maintain systemic balance. A population maintained in precarity is easier to govern than one that is stable, mobile, and economically independent. This is a central logic of militarized political economy, where control is exercised not only through force, but through the regulation of scarcity.
The blockade imposed after 2006 formalized this system into full economic enclosure. Gaza became a sealed economy without sovereignty, meaningful access to trade, or control over its own resources. Restrictions on fuel, construction materials, medicine, and exports narrowed economic life to subsistence. Ambition was displaced by survival. In this context, siege ceased to be a temporary security measure and instead became infrastructure…structuring markets, labor, and development itself.
Within this framework, militarization and the economy operate as a single system. Military operations routinely destroyed infrastructure that could not be adequately rebuilt due to blockade constraints. Reconstruction dependency deepened external oversight, while humanitarian aid increasingly substituted for political and economic rights. Gaza became a space where survival was calibrated, just enough resources permitted to prevent total collapse, but insufficient for recovery or autonomy.
From a peace-economics perspective, this represents a self-reinforcing war economy. Militarization generates security contracts, surveillance technologies, and defense funding. Siege produces dependency economies reliant on aid flows, external suppliers, and regulatory permissions. Destruction creates demand for reconstruction; reconstruction under conditions of control reproduces vulnerability. These cycles benefit specific political, military, and economic systems while rendering peace structurally unviable.
Repeated military assaults on Gaza function within this structure. Each episode devastates homes, hospitals, power grids, and water systems, while the blockade ensures rebuilding remains conditional and externally regulated. War becomes episodic; siege remains permanent. Civilian life is subordinated within a framework that treats populations as security variables rather than human communities.
Even nonviolent resistance has been absorbed into this logic. The Great March of Return was a mass civilian mobilization demanding mobility, dignity, and economic freedom. It was met not with negotiation, but with lethal force. The response signaled that even peaceful collective action is perceived as destabilizing when immobility itself is a pillar of control. This is the political economy of permanent war: a system in which violence does not signal failure but maintenance. Militarization sustains dependency; dependency sustains political control; political control sustains militarization. Gaza exists within this loop.
October 7, 2023, did not create this system. It became one moment within a much longer historical sequence. To treat it as the beginning is to detach events from their structural conditions. It reframes systemic violence as spontaneous, obscuring the engineered nature of prolonged insecurity. Peace cannot emerge from systems not designed to accommodate it. As long as Gaza remains a sealed economy, a militarized enclosure, and a territory denied sovereignty, cycles of violence will persist regardless of ceasefires or humanitarian interventions. Aid can alleviate suffering, but cannot dismantle structures. Reconstruction without sovereignty restores vulnerability. Political solutions that ignore economic demilitarization merely pause, rather than resolve, conflict.
To claim that the war began on October 7, 2023, is not an act of completeness but of distortion. It sidelines displacement, normalizes occupation, sanitizes blockade, and renders civilian suffering incidental. October 7 is a critical node, but not the origin. That origin lies in the foundational injustices of 1948 and the systems constructed in their aftermath.
Author’s Bio
Yumna Zahid Ali is an international journalist and educator whose work examines conflict, political economy, and human rights. She has published widely in prestigious newspapers and outlets across the USA, UK, Malaysia, Pakistan, and South Africa, including the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, New York Daily News, The Dallas Morning News (USA), Manchester Evening News (UK), The Star (Malaysia), Dawn (Pakistan), and The Sowetan (South Africa). She has received training through Harvard Project Zero and holds a Silver Medal in English Linguistics. She is based in Karachi, Pakistan.
The views expressed in guest essays are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions, perspectives, or policies of Peace Economy Project.
