When Benjamin Netanyahu described the October 7 Hamas assault as Israel’s 9/11, he was not merely reaching for a dramatic comparison. He was invoking a political script the modern world already understands too well: a shocking act of violence, a traumatized public, a government demanding unquestioned unity, and then a sweeping military response presented as both moral necessity and historical destiny. That comparison has endured not because the two events are identical, but because both became catalysts for wars whose consequences far exceeded the original attack.
From that moment, October 7 ceased to be discussed only as a security breach or a militant operation. It became the foundation for an argument of limitless retaliation. In the same way the United States used September 11 to launch a sprawling global “war on terror” with no clear end point, Israel used October 7 to justify an overwhelming campaign in Gaza that many across the world now view not as self-defense alone, but as collective punishment on a catastrophic scale.
That is where the deeper controversy begins. For many critics of Israeli policy, the central question is no longer whether Hamas carried out a brutal attack. That much is clear. The question is whether the Israeli state, with one of the most sophisticated intelligence and military systems on earth, failed in a way that defies logic, or whether political actors exploited a known threat and allowed events to spiral because the aftermath would serve a larger strategic agenda. That suspicion has gained traction because of repeated claims that warnings existed, that intelligence signals were missed or ignored, and that the scale of the breach was too extraordinary to dismiss as mere incompetence.
Those claims remain contested, but the broader political consequence is not. October 7 handed the Israeli government what it had long sought: a moment in which nearly any level of force could be defended before Western capitals as regrettable but necessary. The result was not simply a war against Hamas. It was the acceleration of a project many Palestinians and their supporters believe has been years in the making, the reduction of Gaza into an unlivable zone, the forced displacement of civilians, and the steady erosion of any remaining belief in a just political settlement.
The tragedy is that Gaza did not become a humanitarian catastrophe overnight. It was already a sealed and suffocated territory long before the bombs intensified. What October 7 did was provide the pretext for an even harsher phase. Entire neighborhoods were flattened. Civilian infrastructure was shattered. Access to food, fuel, water, electricity, and medicine became entangled with military calculations. In such conditions, what is called war begins to resemble something else: the organized destruction of the basic conditions of life.
And Gaza is not the whole story. While international cameras remained fixed on airstrikes and rubble, pressure in the West Bank deepened. Raids expanded. Settler violence intensified. Palestinian communities lived under mounting fear that what was happening in Gaza was not an exception but a preview. To many observers, the war did not look like an isolated campaign against a militant organization. It looked like part of a broader remaking of the territorial and demographic reality of historic Palestine.
This is why the phrase “once Gaza is off the map” has carried such chilling force in critical commentary. It reflects the fear that Gaza’s devastation is not the endpoint but the opening chapter in a wider strategy to extinguish viable Palestinian existence as a political fact. Whether through bombardment, siege, annexation, demographic pressure, or slow strangulation, the effect is the same: making Palestinian nationhood increasingly impossible.
Yet even amid the immense violence, the attempt to impose a single official narrative has faltered. In city after city, from London to Paris to Berlin and beyond, huge demonstrations erupted in solidarity with Palestinians. Governments that tried to narrow public debate or stigmatize dissent encountered a reality they could not fully control. Millions of ordinary people saw beyond diplomatic language and media framing. They saw children under rubble, hospitals under pressure, families fleeing with nowhere safe to go, and they asked the question power prefers to suppress: what does self-defense mean when the victims are overwhelmingly trapped civilians?
That moral backlash matters. It suggests that state narratives, however polished, no longer move uncontested across the global stage. The old assumption that Western governments could define the boundaries of acceptable outrage is weakening. Palestine has become not only a geopolitical issue but a test of moral credibility for the international order itself.
To understand why this conflict keeps returning in deadlier forms, one must also confront the wreckage of the peace process. The Oslo Accords of the 1990s were marketed as a breakthrough, a roadmap toward coexistence, mutual recognition, and a two-state solution. For a brief moment, the world was told that history might bend toward reconciliation. But Oslo did not produce a sovereign Palestinian state. It produced a fragmented autonomy under occupation, layered with checkpoints, settlements, asymmetrical power, and endless delays.
The promise was peace; the reality was management. The language was diplomacy; the substance was domination. Palestinians were expected to govern fragments of land without control over borders, airspace, true security, or essential resources. Israel, meanwhile, retained decisive leverage. Among the most vital issues was water, one of the most strategic assets in that arid geography. Control over land and control over water were never secondary matters. They were central to sovereignty, and sovereignty was precisely what remained unresolved.
This is why so many critics came to see Oslo not as a bridge to justice but as a mechanism for postponing it. Instead of ending the conflict, it institutionalized imbalance. Instead of two states living side by side in dignity, it entrenched a hierarchy in which one side held overwhelming power and the other was told to negotiate from permanent weakness.
Now, years later, the illusion has collapsed in full view. The present war has exposed the bankruptcy of every slogan that once covered the absence of real peace. The international community speaks of restraint while weapons flow. Leaders speak of humanitarian concern while entire populations are starved of safety. Institutions speak of law while impunity expands. The contradiction is glaring.
And still, amid the darkness, one truth remains stubborn. Military supremacy can devastate cities, but it cannot manufacture legitimacy. Fear can silence some voices, but it cannot extinguish memory. A people under siege may be wounded, scattered, even betrayed by the world, but not erased from history simply because a stronger power wills it.
What has unfolded since October 7 is therefore larger than a battle between Israel and Hamas. It is a confrontation between competing futures. One future is built on permanent war, collective punishment, demographic engineering, and the belief that force can settle what justice has been denied the chance to resolve. The other insists, however faintly in this hour, that no civilization can build lasting security on the ruins of another people’s existence.
That is the real issue before the world. Not only who fired first in the latest cycle, nor which government commands the stronger propaganda machinery, but whether humanity has become so morally exhausted that mass suffering can be rationalized as strategy. Gaza has become a mirror held up to the world. In it we see not just the violence of one region, but the failure of an international system that speaks the language of human rights while tolerating horrors in plain sight.
The lesson is brutal but unavoidable. Once violence becomes doctrine, and revenge becomes policy, every promise of order becomes hollow. The path out cannot be paved by siege, exterminatory rhetoric, or the fantasy that one people’s freedom requires another people’s disappearance. Any future worthy of the name must begin with equal humanity, equal dignity, and a rejection of the machinery that turns trauma into a license for endless destruction.
That is the question October 7 has left behind. Not merely what supposedly happened, but what the world chose to permit in response.
By Hon. Chima Nnadi-Oforgu
Duruebube Uzii na Abosi
For Oblong Media Global Intelligence
OBLONG MEDIA GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE 
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