From the Green Line to the Yellow Line: A Story of Colonization in Palestine

“It’s a very painful feeling to be living in your own home, with only moments separating you from death,” he said. ​“We’re constantly hit by gunfire, missile shrapnel, and explosions. It’s a very difficult feeling when you’re in your home and never feel safe for even a minute.”

According to the ceasefire agreement, the yellow line was intended to only demarcate the first stage of Israeli troop withdrawal, but it’s become the de facto border of Gaza and now Israel has constructed gates, sandy embankments and military posts along the yellow line suggesting preparations for a more permanent militarized frontier.

For Palestinians, the yellow line is only the most recent chapter in colonial violence. Growing up in Gaza, the ​“green line” circumscribed our lives and separated Palestinians from one another and from the world.

In 1949, Israel agreed on new borders for Palestine with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. These borders, like the state of Israel itself, were created just a year prior on the ruins of 530 Palestinian towns and villages. The line, drawn with the help of U.S. diplomat and mediator Ralph Bunche, defined Israel’s new borders and became known as the green line for one simple reason: Bunche used a green marker to draw it.

The green line also marked the boundary of the West Bank. Following Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967, the entire territory came under Israeli control. As time passed, Israel pushed and blurred the boundaries of the green line with bypass roads and settlements built on top of and displacing Palestinian towns and communities. Over the years, Israel’s green line swallowed approximately 200 square kilometers of Gaza, more than a third of Gaza’s territory under the 1949 agreement.

In reality, the green line had no color. My mother once traveled from Gaza to the West Bank, and my uncle asked her to meet him at the green line on the West Bank side. She kept searching the area for something green but found nothing. After wandering around for nearly an hour, she finally found my uncle and learned that the green line did not actually have a color at all. 

The ​“line” was simply a fiction created by Israeli colonizers, made real by brutal violence and internalized by colonized people as an act of survival. A green line drawn in marker on a map has profoundly shaped the lives of Palestinians. 

In 2018, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza marched every week to that arbitrary line demarcating the Israeli border, calling on the world to end Israel’s blockade of Gaza and recognize their rights as refugees in mass marches called the Great March of Return. 

These nonviolent protests were organized and attended by a cross section of Palestinian civil society. Israel responded with lethal force, killing more than 200 marchers and injuring more than 20,000 for getting near that line.

For the last three years, Palestinians in Gaza have been subjected to a new and terrifying onslaught of lines, zones, and borders that became a core feature in Israel’s genocide. Israel divided the Gaza Strip into blocs, assigning each area a number to make it easier for the Israeli military to issue evacuation orders. Israel dropped millions of leaflets on Gaza marking blocs for immediate evacuation and demolitions, sending waves of displacement and fear among Palestinians. The blocs were marked with red; Palestinians were given only a few hours to leave.

At the same time, Israel split Gaza into two main sections, the north and the south, ordering Palestinians to leave the northern part of the Strip. This division was enforced through a military corridor stretching from the Mediterranean coast in western Gaza to its eastern border, passing through the site of the former Israeli settlement of Netzarim, which existed until Israel’s 2005 disengagement. The corridor consequently became known as the Netzarim Corridor.

My colleagues and family members in Gaza were forcibly displaced dozens of times, traveling dangerous roads with thousands of others with no guarantee their destination would be safer than the neighborhoods being pummeled by airstrikes behind them.

In 2025, the Israeli military deployed yellow concrete blocks to mark the yellow line. These blocks have become a nightmare for people in Gaza because they keep moving. In many cases, Palestinians living near the yellow line have woken up to find that soldiers have moved the blocks further into their neighborhoods, placing their homes inside the newly expanded zone. Overnight, their homes were now in an area under direct Israeli military control. And the moving line has continued to consume more and more of Gaza’s fertile agricultural land, contributing to the starvation of Palestinians.

Arwa, an educator from Gaza who lives near the yellow line in Deir Al-Balah, said the constantly moving nature of the line has made it nearly impossible for Palestinians to rebuild the essential aspects of their daily lives.

“We’d be outside trying to enjoy fresh air in the middle of the blazing summer and suddenly we’d hear tanks shooting out of the blue. Shortly, quadcopters would follow and start shooting,” she said, ​“Other than the safety of my friends and colleagues, the displacement of so many of our school teachers is making me worried about the school shutting down, one of the last few spaces still providing education for around 600 elementary students and around 800 preparatory students.”

The yellow line is Gaza’s newest nightmare. It echoes the violent imposition of the green line in 1949, yet it’s more expansive, more fluid, and more frightening. Unlike the green line, which marked an armistice boundary, the yellow line continues to move, steadily shrinking the cage that Israel has created for Palestinians in Gaza.

Rather than allowing new militarized borders to further confine Palestinians, the world must draw a line against continued violations of international law and the ongoing colonization of Palestinian land. The yellow line should be abolished. It has no place in a just and peaceful future, for Palestinians or for anyone else.