Benjamin Netanyahu rushed headlong into the trap set for him by Hamas in Gaza with the carnage of October 7, 2023. Seventy days after the start of an offensive designed to eradicate Hamas – an offensive suspended for a single week of truce – Israel has succeeded in eliminating only one important Islamic leader, Ahmed al-Ghandour, the military commander for northern Gaza. While Gaza City in the north has already been half destroyed, Israel's bombardment is continuing to sow destruction and death in the center and south of the Palestinian enclave.

A map circulated by the Israeli army to define targeted areas, to let the population know where to flee, on very short notice, is based on a document half a century old. It was drawn up in 1971 under the authority of Ariel Sharon, then commander of Israel's southern military region. A hero for his military exploits in 1956 and 1967, the ambitious general fought a low-intensity Palestinian insurrection that his predecessors had failed to contain. Sharon chose to use strong-arm tactics, demolishing whole swathes of residential neighborhoods to open up routes for Israeli tanks.

Such a brutal reconfiguration of urban space led to the forced displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians within the Gaza Strip, a figure considered exorbitant at the time. Today, almost two million of the Palestinian territory's 2.3 million civilians have been forced to abandon their homes, sometimes repeatedly, by extreme violence. Elected prime minister by a landslide in 2001, Sharon once again dealt with the persistent challenge of the Gaza Strip, 30 years after the success of his 1971 counter-insurgency campaign.

This time, in 2005, he evacuated the 8,000 settlers who, under the protection of the Israeli army, monopolized a quarter of the land in this overpopulated Palestinian enclave. While putting an end to the direct occupation of Gaza, the unilateral disengagement left Israel exclusive control of the territory's air and sea space as well as its land access (in collaboration with Egypt to the south). Such disengagement represented only the appearance of a withdrawal. Shortly afterward, Sharon unleashed a bombing campaign against Gaza under the evocative name of "Eternal Renewal."

The recycling of the 1971 map to "frame" the current offensive in Gaza demonstrates the extent to which military thinking in Israel has remained frozen in a denial of the human reality of this territory. Not only are the strikes far more lethal against the population than in previous offensives, but the IDF is fine with dozens of civilians being collateral damage when targeting a single Hamas official, even the lower-ranked ones.

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