The Gaza Strip is not only a literal field of ruins, with the total or partial destruction of nearly 90% of buildings, over 80% of businesses and more than two-thirds of the road network. The Palestinian enclave is also a field of ruins where a significant portion of international law has been violated with impunity for a year and a half. It is also a field of ruins for language itself – words emptied of meaning, unable to grasp such a catastrophe, even as superlatives are overused, or worse, begin to invert their meaning.

George Orwell admirably anticipated this process of inversion of meaning as early as 1949 when he invented Newspeak in his masterpiece 1984. Just as "freedom is slavery" under Orwell's pen, some terms have come to mean their opposite in the devastated Gaza Strip.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government loudly proclaimed their determination to achieve a "total victory" over Hamas in retaliation for the massacres perpetrated by the Islamist militia and its allies in Israel on October 7, 2023. A year and a half later, the devastation inflicted on the Gaza Strip had not weakened Hamas – quite the contrary, as Israeli bombings dealt terrible blows to local alternatives to the Islamist movement while allowing it to compensate for its losses by massively recruiting young activists eager for revenge. Furthermore, Israel's ban on allowing the international press to access the Gaza Strip allowed Hamas propaganda to shockingly stage the release of Israeli hostages.

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