Temporal ruination: Scarcity, entrapment, and the affective intensities of time in Gaza

Abstract

As the Israeli genocidal war drags past 700 days in Gaza, the temporality and rhythms of daily life have been dismantled, with a complete lack of linearity and plannability. In tracing how the settler colonial project in Palestine weaponises time through checkpoints, permit regime, court bureaucracy, and different colonial actors, the temporalities of attrition and slow violence in Gaza reached their most acute form after October 7. Drawing on 15 interviews from Gaza and other materials, the article narrates the development from the slow temporalities into the ruined temporalities of current Gaza through Israeli entrapment and scarcity-making. Centring people's experiences, the article reveals how queuing for survival has become the centre of daily life, featuring exhaustion, humiliation, and anticipatory dread, as it’s overlapping affective intensities. Temporal ruination, I argue, is (i) the collapse of time's coherence under conditions of siege, entrapment, and infrastructural annihilation; (ii) a deliberate tactic of domination that renders daily life unstructured, unpredictable, and uninhabitable; and (iii) an affectively saturated state marked by exhaustion, humiliation, and anticipatory dread. In conclusion, I highlight the microgestures people attempt that can neither remedy ruin nor redeem annihilation, but instead fleetingly interrupt their colonial logics.