The New Dark Age

Wednesday, 27 August 2025 — Marginalia Subversiva

This is the very architecture of genocidal language, laid bare. Here is a verbatim translation of the announcement in the leaflet, without interpretation or reframing:

Urgent | The Israeli Occupation Army publishes an important statement to the residents of Gaza Strip, specifically Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip, regarding what is being spread as false rumors that there is no place in the southern Gaza Strip to relocate the population.

Before the transition to the next stage of the war, I want to confirm that there are wide empty areas in the southern Gaza Strip, as is the case in the central camps and in the central area. These areas were cleared by the army. The army will continue to clear more areas known to you later, to help the residents as much as possible.

Accordingly: there are no excuses. Therefore, every family must move south in order to benefit from the humanitarian aid that is being worked on these days, where the defense army has begun bringing in tents and preparing areas to establish complexes for distributing humanitarian aid and extending water lines and other things.

Caption under the map:

“Empty and additional areas in the southern Gaza Strip available for the benefit of evacuating the northern Gaza Strip.”

They say “cleared”, but we know what that means: neighborhoods pulverized, homes reduced to dust, lives erased. Then, with obscene efficiency, they claim to have “found” empty areas—empty because they emptied them. This is the language of annihilation disguised as logistics.

It’s textbook narrative violence. Words like “cleared” normalize massacre, turn mass displacement into a “humanitarian gesture.” They destroy, then reframe destruction as benevolence: we bombed you, now here’s a tent. It’s the colonial logic of replacement—kill, erase, rename, and call it order.

What’s most chilling is the bureaucratic precision: maps, grids, designated “zones.” The announcement is styled like an urban planning update, as though extermination were merely municipal management. This is the impudence: genocide presented as spatial organization, extermination disguised as real estate management.

It’s the same colonial lexicon used in other genocides:

• The U.S. spoke of “clearing the frontier.”

• Settler regimes talked of “empty land.”

• Sri Lanka spoke of “liberated zones.”

But the reality is the same: erasure made into policy.

This leaflet isn’t just propaganda—it’s an exhibit of genocide. A record of how death is rationalized, sanitized, and written into maps.