A city of walls and ashes sinks into the future as the campaign presses on, and the map itself seems to sigh with fatigue: the outer districts already fallen, the operation entered into a first phase, as if history were a clock whose hands move with a slow and inexorable malice. In the dust of the borderlands, a stubborn calculus persists—evacuations to shelter the innocent, promises of aid to mute the scream of hunger—yet the mere possibility of a widening ruin gnaws at the nerve of any delicate mercy.

Earlier, a skirmish of iron and fire near Khan Yunis—more than fifteen armed Palestinians against a position, anti-tank missiles, three Israeli soldiers wounded—Israeli fire replying with a measured violence, ten attackers slain, while Hamas claims responsibility for a strike on a newly established hostile post southeast of Khan Yunis. The arithmetic of blood in the Levant continues to tally itself, and the chorus of spectators grows increasingly hushed. Draft notices—about sixty thousand to be issued this week—signal a mobilization that neither side can ever unmake, while the defence minister’s plan to seize Gaza City and the prime minister’s alleged order to hasten the dismantling of Hamas’s last strongholds truncate time itself, as if speed could excise history’s bitterness from the present.

Context, if we must name it: the war erupted on a day when a multitude of lives and freedoms were overturned, when a thousand plus lives were extinguished and more than two hundred and fifty hostages vanished into the night. Palestinian accounts speak of more than sixty thousand dead in Gaza, of a landscape unmade by fire and siege, a population displaced to the thresholds of memory and ruin. In such a theater, the ancient questions return with a clang: what remains of civilization when the will to power devours even the precautionary instincts of mercy? What tragedy is this but a Greek chorus reimagined for the modern state, where noble aims quickly darken into necessity, where hubris greets nemesis, and where the last vestiges of concord dissolve in the fever of retaliation? Nietzsche would shrug at the illusion that progress grants us safety, reminding us that the abyss does not yield to plan, only to time’s indifferent erosion. And so we behold a Western stance that once spoke of light, now compelled to count the dead and defend the borders of a fragile memory, while the world’s old theatre—the Greek stage of tragedy—recedes into a persisting shadow, lamenting a culture that seems to confuse endurance with endurance for pain.