In Gaza in particular and Palestine in general, history is unfolding in real time. Two years into an Israeli war widely recognised as a genocide, the official Palestinian death toll stands at nearly 70,000 – a figure likely to be a significant underestimate. By the Israeli military’s own acknowledgement, more than 83 percent of those killed have been civilians. At least 20,000 have been children. The Israeli assault has displaced almost the entire population of two million people, and damaged or destroyed more than 90 percent of homes in Gaza.
In October 2025, the Israeli government and Hamas agreed on a US-engineered ceasefire enabling the release of the remaining Israeli captives in Gaza (twenty of whom are still alive) and 1,700 Palestinian detainees (held indefinitely without trial by Israel) alongside 250 Palestinian prisoners. Yet in the weeks since the ceasefire came formally into effect, Israeli forces have continued to open fire on Palestinians in Gaza. At the time of writing they have killed more than 200 people, including eleven members of a single family, and wounded at least 600. They have also destroyed more than 1,500 buildings in Gaza in this time.
For all Trump’s claims to have brought peace to the region, serious questions remain unanswered – notably that of who will govern Gaza going forwards. Under the terms of the Trump deal, the Israeli military retains an on-the-ground presence in more than half of the Gaza Strip, and even the final stage of his plan – if ever implemented – would leave 15 percent of it in Israeli hands. We have yet to see whether the future will be characterised by more continuity or change, but there is no question that future historians will devote considerable attention to the Gaza genocide of the 2020s as a critical moment in the history of Palestine, Israel, the Middle East and indeed the wider world.
Yet at the same time as history is being made in Gaza, it is also being destroyed. Israel’s near-total destruction of the Gaza Strip has included the large-scale obliteration of heritage sites, memorials, museums, archival collections, educational institutions and other depositories of knowledge. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed. Most importantly, the mass killing of Palestinians there has also extinguished the knowledge, memories, experiences and indeed the histories that they carry as individuals. Genocide targets a people’s past as much as their present.
In such a setting, it is critical to ask what the purpose of studying, researching and writing the history of Gaza really is, and whether it can be justified. Such questions are especially pertinent in the Western Anglophone academy, where knowledge production has long been shaped by epistemic violence. Many governments and public institutions are complicit in the genocide. The dynamics of the geo-political context are particularly acute for those of us based at UK institutions, connected to the same state that colonised Palestine for three decades, brutally suppressed the Palestinians’ nationalist movement, facilitated their dispossession, and created the legal framework that continues to underpin the Israeli occupation today.
The resulting privilege directly enables our work. UK-based historians have easy access to archival records from the British Mandate period, which the British visa regime restricts or denies altogether to Palestinians in Palestine and those with non-Western passports. Moreover, the global mobility hierarchy enables historians with Western citizenship to freely conduct research across a range of international settings, as the dispersal of Palestinian records necessitates. Again, this is a privilege denied to the majority of Palestinians themselves – not by accident, but by design.
Compounding matters further, Western historiography has its own culpability. For many decades, most of the mainstream Anglophone historiography dismissed and marginalised not only Palestinian testimonies but also the ample work of Palestinian historians and scholars in documenting the ongoing Nakba. That the significant historiographical turning point came with the work of the Israeli New Historians in the 1980s and 1990s – based on declassified Israeli documents – speaks to the continuing testimonial injustice at play.
The related hermeneutical injustice is especially significant precisely because it is not limited to the academy in terms of its relevance (or to put it another way, it is not strictly academic). Historical narratives have always been critical in determining the contemporary discourse around the so-called ‘Question of Palestine’. For Palestinian refugees to lay claim to their rights and achieve justice, it matters that the reality of the Nakba is established – and it matters that Israeli culpability is recognised. In other words, Nakba denial, and everything that goes with it, has real world consequences.
Where does all this leave Western-based historians in 2025? Over the last two years, the world has become accustomed to a preponderance of horrifying images coming out of Gaza. These images show the human impact of a genocidal war: starvation, homelessness, amputation, disease, isolation and terror. They are simultaneously shocking, disturbing, and alarming, often giving rise to anger and outrage. But the sheer scale and multiplicity of such images can have other effects as well. As observers have pointed out about many crises over the years, over time the repetition and multiplicity of horrors can have a numbing effect on those viewing them. Relatedly, and more alarmingly, it can also create a sense of inevitability, particularly among audiences in the West as they consume this media through several layers of removal. Many Westerners have come to see Gaza, and Palestine-Israel in general, as spaces that are inextricably tied to continual catastrophe. As a result, the dynamic between time and place can be collapsed; Gaza, Palestine, becomes constructed, either deliberately or inadvertently, as a site of inevitable disaster divorced from political analysis or human actions. It is taken out of history by a discourse that reframes modern settler colonial destruction as intercommunal tribal violence that is primordial, ancient, religiously-driven – and therefore inevitable.
Studying history provides one way to break through the impasse of this construction. Although the Western historiography has been slow to catch up, recent decades have seen some long-overdue (if still inadequate) recognition of Palestinian scholarship. Such developments have shown definitively that violence in Palestine is not ingrained or inevitable, nor is it ancient or fundamentally religious. On the contrary, it is, by any measure, a phenomenon limited to the last century and characterised by modern forces: settler colonialism, nation-state nationalism, militarised border regimes, and mass surveillance. Studying this history enables us to reassert the true political factors driving the violence, moving away from its wrongful construction as timeless and inevitable, and to focus instead on human actions and responsibility.
At the same time, studying this history also enables us to establish some of the context behind the last two years. Since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023 – in which Palestinian militants killed nearly 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped 251 to Gaza, the majority civilians, including children – context has become a loaded and often contentious term. After UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres referred to it when condemning the attacks, Israeli representative Gilad Erdan called for his resignation. It was far from the only such case. Many subsequent media explainers have located October 7 as the starting point of the violence, tracing the killing and displacement in Gaza from that day onwards. One widely-shared BBC graph shows how almost the entire population of Gaza were displaced in subsequent months. What the graph didn’t show is that the displacement of the Palestinian people, particularly those in Gaza, long predated October 2023.
In fact, before the onset of the genocide, the majority of Palestinians were already refugees. As countless Palestinians have pointed out, the recent images of forced displacement in Gaza have powerful antecedents. The modern entity of the Gaza Strip was formed during the original Nakba of 1948, when the establishment of the state of Israel entailed the deliberate and planned expulsion of the Palestinian people across the country at the hands of Zionist militias and the Israeli army, creating more than 750,000 refugees. Around 200,000 fled to Gaza, joining a local population of 80,000 and thus transforming the area into one with majority-refugee demographics.
For the Palestinians, the Nakba did not end in 1948 but became an ongoing phenomenon, reinforced by Israel’s denial of the refugees’ right of return and underpinned by its long-term military occupation of both Gaza and the West Bank from 1967. Accordingly, Palestinians experience the displacement of the 2020s genocide not as a singular event, but as part of a repeated cycle. And they experience the genocide not as an aberration, but as the culmination of a decades-long history. This, ultimately, is the meaning of writing Gaza’s history at this time: to establish the deeper roots of the violence; to counter the excuse of inevitability; and, in so doing, to assert the human choices, responsibility and culpability that continue to drive the destruction of Gaza today.