DEIR AL BALAH, Gaza Strip — Every day for the last three months, he had looked at it. And for every day of the last three months he had ignored it, even as it moved ever closer.
But now the Yellow Line — the demarcation indicating the limit of Israel’s military zone in Gaza — was barely 100 yards from Ashraf Al-Louh’s shelter. It was time to leave.
Many people around him had already done so, and every day saw more people join the exodus from this war-blighted neighborhood in the city of Deir al Balah. The Israeli military marks the Yellow Line with large yellow-painted cement blocks and has moved them westward as it occupies more and more territory.
As Al-Louh spoke, a donkey cart with three elderly women and two elderly men as passengers came into view. It creaked past his shelter, past the collapsed buildings and ravaged orchards towards the west, away from the Yellow Line. The passengers’ extra clothing was wrapped in a mattress cover, and in the center of the group stood a few cans of beans and two sacks of flour — all their remaining possessions.
“We’re exhausted. We’ve already been displaced seven times,” said Al-Louh, 45, his eyes following the donkey cart before glancing eastward toward the yellow blocks.
The Yellow Line first came to be in October 2025, when Israel and Hamas signed a Trump administration-brokered truce and Israeli troops withdrew from some territory as part of the ceasefire’s first phase.
Though the line has not been recognized by the United Nations or other international organizations as a legal border, it effectively divides the enclave into two zones: an eastern one controlled by the Israeli military and the Gazan militias it counts as its allies, and a Palestinian-controlled western section where most of Gaza’s 2.1 million people live and which is still subject to daily Israeli attacks.
But over the 10 months since, as the ceasefire stalled with no surge of aid into the enclave, no Israeli withdrawal and no Hamas disarmament, Israel has shifted the Yellow Line gradually westward, displacing thousands of Gazans and cramming them along with much of the enclave’s population into an ever-shrinking space, all living in dystopian conditions.
When the Yellow Line was created, Israel occupied 53% of Gaza. Now, about 64% of Gaza is under Israeli control, not including an expanded restricted territory — dubbed the Orange Zone — where the Israeli military stipulates aid groups must coordinate delivery into the Palestinian-controlled part of the enclave.
For Al-Louh, his wife and six children, living under the overhang of a partially destroyed building, the Yellow Line has imposed its own schedule.
“About a month ago it was a kilometer away. Back then we felt there was still some safety,” he said, trudging around his makeshift shelter of torn tarpaulin, tree branches, splintered door frames and fabric anchored with chunks of masonry.
“But week after week it kept moving closer. Every time people hoped it would stop, it advanced again.”
Straying near the Yellow Line is a deadly prospect.
Last month, the U.N.’s Office for the Coordinator of Human Affairs said 196 Palestinians— including 18 women and 43 children — were killed since the ceasefire up to early April in Israeli attacks near the Yellow Line. Israel has in the past said such attacks were in self-defense when its troops felt there was an immediate threat.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has told Israeli media that the yellow blocks serve as a warning to “Hamas terrorists and Gaza residents that any violation or attempt to cross the line will be met with fire.”
A short distance away from Al-Louh, a group of farmers was harvesting eggplants even though they were still unripe, knowing they probably wouldn’t get another chance.
“I’m working all day to get it all out of the ground before we can’t reach here anymore,” said Ahmed Al-Louh, 25, a relative of Al-Louh’s, as he worked a half-acre field that, despite the fighting, had produced a modest harvest.
Ahmed had already taken most of his belongings and those of his wife’s to another area farther west.
“Everything essential is already there,” he said.
“I’m just waiting for the moment we have to run.”
As he spoke, bursts of gunfire echoed from beyond a nearby cluster of war-damaged high-rise buildings overlooking the area. Moments later, a military quadcopter flew in and hovered directly above Ahmed and a visiting reporter as they stood near the eggplant field.
The drone remained overhead for several minutes, apparently filming and documenting at close range, before turning back.
Last week, Hamas along with the Board of Peace — the President Trump-appointed body overseeing the ceasefire in Gaza — announced Hamas would begin disarmament but conditioned it on Israel ending its attacks and engaging in sequenced withdrawals from Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, said Tuesday that Israel will not withdraw its forces until Hamas completely disarms.
So far, more than 1,230 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the ceasefire in Gaza came into effect in October, and the Israeli military has destroyed thousands of buildings. Israel says the attacks are meant to stop Hamas from reconstituting itself.
Israel, meanwhile, has moved toward evolving the Yellow Line from disconnected concrete blocks into a barrier.
Satellite imagery shows large-scale earthworks, berms and barriers stretching more than 25 miles in length. Experts say they indicate Israel is planning for a long-term military occupation, rather than a temporary presence that eventually hands control over to an international stabilization force, as per the ceasefire’s terms.
In an interview in May, Netanyahu said the intention behind taking more of Gaza’s territory was to squeeze Hamas.
“We are now in 60% of the territory of the Gaza Strip. We were at 50%. We moved to 60%. My directive is to move to — take it step by step,” he said, according to local media reports.
When an audience member interrupted him to say Israel should take 100% of the enclave, Netanyahu responded with “first of all 70. Let’s start with that.”
Al-Louh has become well-versed in the pattern preceding the Yellow Line’s advance.
First comes the quadcopter, like the one that hovered over the neighborhood a few weeks before and issued a warning from its loudspeaker to “move west or we’ll shoot.”
Families raced to pack whatever they could, before the shooting began, he said, with tanks and armored vehicles pouring into the area and troops firing machine gun bursts into the darkness.
“We knew it was supposed to be warning fire,” Al-Louh said. “But warning fire can still kill anyone.”
Three hours later, the shooting stopped, and by dawn it was all quiet. But in the morning light, he could see the yellow blocks were now closer.
One of those displaced by the advance was Jamal Abu Miri, a 68-year-old retired land surveyor who understood firsthand that the Yellow Line was more than just an arbitrary marker on a map.
He had worked for more than four decades in Saudi Arabia, saving every rial he could so as to invest in the land in Deir al Balah he hoped his sons would one day inherit. But that changed when the line reached the edge of his property, with Israeli bulldozers in tow.
Week by week, with the Yellow Line nudging ever westward, Abu Miri watched the slow dismantling of his efforts: First the three vegetable greenhouses were destroyed; then the acre of olive groves, the 25 date palms, the irrigation pools, before the bulldozers started tearing at parts of his home, when he finally left with his family to live in a tent.
“Everything I owned was supposed to support my sons and grandchildren. Now it’s beyond the line; it’s gone forever,” he said.
“The Yellow Line is a quiet thief. It stole my land, my work and everything I spent my life building. How can you replace 45 years of work?”
Al-Louh, unemployed, has nothing much to lose. He’s already prepared what he can take and distributed what he can’t to relatives around him. His tent probably won’t survive another move, so he’s trying to get one from an aid group. But it doesn’t matter: When the time comes, he’ll go.
“It could happen tonight. It could happen in a few days,” he said, his eyes once more on the yellow blocks that now defined the limit of his world.
“We’re waiting.”
Special correspondent Shbeir reported from Deir al Balah and Times staff writer Bulos from Beirut.