“This is the danger of reading the ceasefire as an event rather than as a phase: it allows the slow violence of fortification, encroachment, and engineered uninhabitability to proceed under the cover of a word that promises its end,” Abdaljawad Omar, an assistant professor at Birzeit university in the West Bank, told Drop Site News.

“This is the whole grammar of settler-colonial space in miniature,” Omar added. “The line is never where the line is said to be. The ‘yellow line,’ like the Green Line before it, like every cartographic fiction Israel has authored, exists in order to be exceeded. It is drawn not to mark a limit but to generate the next transgression of that limit—control of 53% becomes control of 60% becomes the buffer that eats 300 meters more.