Geographical Magazine October 2025 Back Issue

Gaza has been in the headlines for so long it has become a shorthand
question: who will tell the story of Gaza, and who will listen? In exploring the lives of ordinary people caught between occupation, displacement and survival, this remarkable extract from a heartrending diary (see Page 22) reminds us that geography is not only about maps and borders, but about memory – and whose voices are allowed to endure.
From there, we move east to the Philippines, where the beaches of Palawan tell another contested story (Page 42). Developers promise ecotourism and investment; Indigenous Tagbanua communities see land taken from under them. What emerges is a tale familiar in many parts of the world — who has the right to land, and who is pushed aside in the name of progress and profit?
Geography isn’t an abstract discipline. It’s lived every day in the fight for land, identity and the simple right to be heard. Our task is to keep those stories alive, to trace the threads that connect them and to remind ourselves that behind every contested coastline or geopolitical struggle are human lives.