What happens if you try to squeeze two million Palestinians into an ever shrinking slice of Gaza? Omar Shaban Ismail, a senior analyst at PalThink–a Palestinian-oriented think tank–and a development expert, attempts to provide an answer to that question in a June 8 analysis published in Responsible Statecraft. “It is a direct and deliberate policy of slow death, one that forces the population into an overcrowded and ever-shrinking open-air prison that lacks even the most basic conditions to sustain life,” Ismail writes. “The plan Israel is implementing in Gaza is not the Trump Plan but a plan to make Gaza permanently uninhabitable.”
Furthermore, “What is being imposed now is the compression of an entire society into a space that can no longer support life, services, dignity, or social order. This is nothing short of demographic suffocation,” he writes further. “The Israeli plan for controlling 70% of the territory—up from 50% in October 2025—will turn the remaining 30% into a pressure cooker.”
While the Israelis are destroying everything, Ismail cites the absence of cemeteries as one of the cruelest indicators of social collapse. “A society that cannot find space to bury its dead cannot be expected to build schools, clinics, playgrounds, water tanks, greenhouses, factories or homes. Even death becomes displaced,” he writes.
“The loss of schools is not only an educational problem. Schools regulate time, protect children, transmit civic norms, and give adolescents a reason to imagine a future. When schools disappear, the street, the shelter, the armed group, the black market and the phone screen become alternative institutions,” Ismail writes, providing an example of the pressure cooker he is describing. “This environment is fertile ground for violence, hatred and extremism—not because Gazans are naturally violent, but because engineered deprivation produces social pathologies. Overcrowded shelters and informal camps concentrate exhausted families in spaces where privacy is absent and resources are scarce.”
