You don’t gratuitously destroy most of the homes in a place if you truly expect people to return to them. The destruction of Gaza’s homes is almost total, leaving over two million people displaced. Universities and schools, museums and religious sites, hospitals and clinics, power and water infrastructure, and bakeries have been blown up. Israel’s thorough, genocidal pettiness speaks for itself when IDF troops pulling out of areas even disable the ambulances left in their wake.
Israel has successfully created a new normal of aid truck trickle, apparently acceptable to the international community, of just 107 aid trucks entering Gaza on 8 February 2024 compared with a pre-war level of over 500 trucks a day. Israel continues its successful propaganda campaign against international humanitarian organizations, without which Gazans would literally die, all part of its efforts to make Gaza uninhabitable.
85 percent of Gazans are now trapped in Rafah, the south where they were told to flee, where they would be safe and now Israel is even conducting strikes there, on all the fish it collected in that barrel. Israel talks of “four battalions of HAMAS” remaining in Rafah, reported uncritically as fact by a media that isn’t even asking basic grounding questions like “how big is a battalion?”
Even the United States, an undeniably full diplomatic and military partner in Israel’s obvious ethnic cleansing and blatant genocide, is starting to make weak noises about Israel “going too far”, as if that wasn’t already true on October 7th when Israel began to systematically raze entire apartment buildings filled with souls, in front of the unflinching lenses of Al-Jazeera’s livestreams.
Netanyahu knows that this is his only window, that his goal must be completed, that Gaza is his final battle, the completion of his very destiny. “If we stop now, we will lose the war,” he says, while making moves to deflect responsibility for the coming final blow to Palestinian life in Gaza, that he has admitted multiple times to be his aim.
In the last few days, Netanyahu’s focus is on temporarily appeasing the international community with announcements that he has instructed the IDF to come up with two plans, one for the “humanitarian” evacuation of Rafah and one for the military assault on the last area that Israel hasn’t yet carpet bombed.
It should go without saying that, with life in the border town of Rafah already an experience of failed ‘shelter’ in tents fashioned from plastic sheets, almost no water or access to medical services, and people subsisting on a few pieces of bread a day, that there is no way to conduct any “evacuation” that would merit being described as “humanitarian.”
There is already little to sustain life in Rafah, and certainly nothing waiting for the 1.4 million already-displaced a few miles away in Khan Younis, the southern area of Gaza immediately north of Rafah. Khan Younis is currently being heavily bombed, as was North and Middle Gaza before it, all part of Israel’s obvious north to south ethnic cleansing of the Strip.
Netanyahu’s order to the IDF to develop plans is insincere on many levels. Israel has long considered scenarios, quoting from the diary of the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, “to spirit the penniless population across the border”.
Everyone involved, including Israel’s international partners, knows there is obviously no credible way to conduct a mass population move right now without more loss of life and exacerbating the already excruciating suffering of displaced Palestinians.
The “humanitarian evacuation plan” will work perfectly as a distraction. It represents more content for the media to feed its audience in exchange for clicks and impressions. And for Israel, it draws attention away from its actual plans being carried out on the ground, obvious to anyone paying attention to Israel’s relentless trajectory towards the inevitable end of Gaza.
When Israel first started publishing maps showing Gaza split into evacuation zones and spoke of broadcasting instructions and dropping leaflets to minimize civilian casualties, how did this make sense to you? Does HAMAS not have ears? More importantly, did you actually believe that Israel would tell HAMAS where it was about to bomb?
After spending a few days playing along with this barely credible script, announcing mandatory evacuations from this or that numbered neighborhood, Israel ditched specific instructions with a general order for everyone to “move south”.
After presenting the idea of safe zones as a humanitarian measure stemming from the most moral army in the world’s demonstrated concern for civilian casualties, and cosplaying with its maps for a while, Israel saw we had swallowed it, ditched its complicated and never actually functioning neighborhood-level juggling game, and proceeded with its obvious main goal, clearing all Palestinians out of Northern Gaza.
The same pattern was repeated in Middle Gaza during the end of 2023 and early January and is now again repeating in South Gaza, with massive bombings of Khan Younis during these last few weeks, and is about to fully commence in Rafah, the last remaining part of southern Gaza. A textbook ethnic cleansing of Gaza, from north to south.
The various post war maps of Gaza floated now and again in the name of Israeli “security”, that depict Palestinians clustered in the bottom two-thirds and Israel occupying the northern third of the Gaza Strip and the widening of the security zone inside the Strip’s borders, are simple gaslighting tools to reassure the leaders of the world whose streets have been flooded with pro-Palestinian protest that there is indeed a post-war reconstruction plan.
Of course there is not. Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party’s goal remains as it has always been, “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” They want to get rid of Palestinians completely, for once and all, their ‘final solution’ to the conflict between two people of expelling the weaker of the two, permanently. This also explains its considerable effort, visibly heightened across social media in December 2023, to delegitimize UNRWA.
Netanyahu’s bubbling frustration at not just being able to ‘murder them all’ is obvious, from his early post-Oct 7 crystal clear invocations of the people of Amalek (which the biblical people of Israel historically obliterated with genocide) and his bragging about being the person who delivered the death blow to the Oslo Accords by crushing the hope of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state with a massive influx of settlers to the West Bank.
Expulsion to Egypt is the logical and only satisfactory resolution to the Gaza problem for Netanyahu. The humanitarian plan will be designed to fail, likely seeing the same IDF targeting of fleeing Palestinians as we saw during the flight south, the planned bombing of Rafah will go on regardless, leaving only one “humanitarian solution” opening Gaza’s southern border—one way or another—to get rid of the Gazans forever. The Egyptians are dreaming if they believe they have any tangible control over their own border or that this isn’t going to happen soon.
We will be left like fools clutching our “post-war Gaza” Israeli fig leaf maps and tormented by the echoes of our helpful resquawking of baseless atrocity propaganda, and the Americans and Europeans will continue to propagate—in their chambers of power, through their compromised media, and on global social media platforms—the same racist demonizations of Palestinians that have enabled Israel’s blatant ethnic cleansing of Gaza and obvious genocide of Gazans to progress unchecked for four months.
Is it too late to stop the complete deletion of Gaza? Of course it is. The United Nations reports 70 percent of all dwellings have been destroyed. We have long accepted Israel’s “right” to act unchecked in Gaza. No proportionality and an inexplicable acceptance of the insane idea that it’s okay to destroy an entire apartment building to kill one guy, who sometimes isn’t even home. We even help them out by calling this murderous collective punishment “self defense”. Some of our countries even rush to replenish Israel’s bombs and rockets, mid-genocide. The time to have insisted Israel act in accordance with post-Holocaust international legal norms was when it began to seriously violate the Oslo Accords.
This is the fruit of our treating Israel as if it were like other nation states. No state created, with a racial supremacist ideological trajectory, was going to produce a different result to what we are seeing in Gaza.
Drunk from its close to the finish line, almost-success in Gaza, Israel is now acting with full impunity, its actions fully underwritten by Genocide Joe & his AIPAC-funded political colleagues and by America’s dependents in Europe. The West Bank has been ‘softened up’ by Israel to test the range of our attention, while we’ve been busy watching Israel ‘mowing the grass’ in Gaza.
A new phenomenon in its scale and implications, Israel has even been taking unprecedentedly brazen steps to openly challenge land ownership of millenia-old Christian religious communities in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Israel is currently an unstoppable juggernaut. If you are honest with yourself, it is clear that Gaza was already uninhabitable by the end of 2023. The West Bank is obviously next. The countries of the world have either actively helped Israel reach this stage or have ‘merely’ let it happen on their watch. And we, the people of the world, will be ashamed for generations and haunted by the very mention of “Gaza”, a word poised to resonate like “Auschwitz” in our lexicon of things that should have never happened.
Developments after this article was written on 11 February 2023…
FEBRUARY 12TH—BOMBING OF RAFAH
FEBRUARY 17TH—NETANYAHU TALKS ABOUT TRANSFERRING THOSE IN RAFAH
Read this thread from Itay Epshtain, Senior Humanitarian Law and Policy Consultant and Special Advisor to the Norwegian Refugee Council @NRC_Norway/@NRC_Geneva.
FEBRUARY 21ST – TRT WORLD REPORT ON SLICING OF GAZA IN TWO
FEBRUARY 23RD – TRT IVE BLOG OF NETANYAHU’S ‘POST-WAR GAZA PLAN’
Scottish OG from the time of the First Intifada and the birth of the international movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people • Former Friends of Birzeit University Coordinator • Birzeit University Public Relations Officer • Cofounder and Editor of the original Electronic Intifada website • Creator of countless websites for pro-Palestinian organizations around the world via nigelparry.net
