Tag: ethnic cleansing

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that any ceasefire in Gaza will only be a temporary pause in the onslaught. Some believe that Tel Aviv has no plans to agree to any truce and is engaging in talks as a stalling tactic. 

Israel’s Channel 12 News reported that Netanyahu said to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, “After the pause, we will transfer the population in the Strip southward and impose a siege [on northern Gaza].”

The population transfer proposal calls for using a 60-day ceasefire to create a “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza. Then Israel will force 600,000 Palestinians into the tent city, followed by the remainder of the population. From there, the Palestinians will be forced to leave Gaza for third countries. 

Many, including former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, have denounced the proposal as creating a concentration camp. 

One Middle East diplomat believes Tel Aviv has no desire to make a deal with Hamas. “He is making public statements that a deal is possible and imminent in order to keep the pressure off of him, but it’s starting to feel like a stalling tactic,” an Arab diplomat said. 

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Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American historian and one of the foremost scholars on genocide in the world. He has spent over 25 years teaching a class on the subject. He deals with atrocities for a living, analyzing some of the very worst things that human beings are capable of. And yet even Bartov has said he can’t bear looking at some of the excruciating images coming out of Gaza any more.

What’s happening, Bartov says, is unprecedented in the 21st century. “I don’t know of any comparable situation. Recent estimates show that about 70% of the structures in Gaza are either completely destroyed or severely damaged,” Bartov says. “The argument that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is conducting a war in Gaza is simply cynical, there is no war in Gaza. What the IDF is doing in Gaza is demolishing it. Hundreds of buildings are being bulldozed every week. This is not a secret, but mainstream media coverage has been insufficient.”

Part of the reason that mainstream coverage has been insufficient is because reporting about what’s happening in Gaza is difficult: foreign reporters are still not allowed into Gaza to see what is happening for themselves and Israel is slaughtering Palestinian journalists on the ground. I feel like I’m screaming into the void every time I repeat some version of that sentence and yet there still seems to be apathy about this assault on press freedom from some of my colleagues in the mainstream media.

As Bartov said, despite the lack of coverage, the systematic destruction of Gaza is hardly a secret. Indeed, the Israeli military is so desperate for extra bulldozers that, over the last couple of months, there have been ads for bulldozer drivers to help demolish Gaza posted on Facebook – some apparently offering as much as 3,000 shekels ($882) a day for the work. I found around a dozen of these ads on Meta since the end of May, many of them on a public Facebook page for bulldozer operators. Meanwhile a Haaretz article from this week looking into the outsourcing of bulldozer drivers found that they are paid per building: 2,500 shekels for the demolition of a small building, 5,000 shekels for a large building.

“The idea that the bulldozer has become a major article of genocide and warfare is quite new,” says Neve Gordon, a professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London. “What is happening in Gaza is not a building here or there being demolished; it’s the destruction of whole villages and towns.”

Also new is the outsourcing of bulldozer drivers. “The Israeli military usually does not work in this way,” says Gordon. “It can sequester bulldozers and draft the drivers as reserve soldiers.” Reports from Israeli outlets show that the IDF is facing a shortage of drivers and is recruiting civilians for military operations in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon. “I would consider this as a form of ‘outsourcing demolitions’ used to advance a genocidal project,” Gordon says.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday he wanted peace with Palestinians but described any future independent state as a platform to destroy Israel and for that reason sovereign power of security must remain with Israel.

Speaking at the White House, where he met U.S. President Donald Trump, Netanyahu described the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, where Hamas was in control, as evidence of what Palestinians would do with a state.

Trump said, “I don’t know” when he was asked by reporters if a two-state solution was possible and referred the question to Netanyahu.

Netanyahu said: “I think the Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves, but none of the powers to threaten us. That means a sovereign power, like overall security, will always remain in our hands.”

Later he added: “After October 7th, people said the Palestinians have a state, a Hamas state in Gaza and look what they did with it. They didn’t build it up. They built down into bunkers, into terror tunnels after which they massacred our people, raped our women, beheaded our men, invaded our cities and our towns, our kibbutzim and did horrendous massacres, the kind of which we didn’t see since World War Two and the Nazis, the Holocaust. So people aren’t likely to say, ‘Let’s just give them another state.’ It’ll be a platform to destroy Israel.

“We will work out a peace with our Palestinian neighbours, those who don’t want to destroy us and we will work out a peace in which our security, the sovereign power of security, always remains in our hands,” Netanyahu said.

“Now people will say, ‘It’s not a complete state, it’s not a state, it’s not that.’ We don’t care. We vowed never again. Never again is now. It’s not going to happen again.”

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Over 630 days of war later and much of Hamas’ top command has been wiped out, and large swathes of the Gaza Strip obliterated. It’s been no secret that the Netanyahu government is pursuing the complete annihilation of Hamas, ensuring that it can never again return to rule, but the reality is that the Israeli army (IDF) is still taking on mass casualties.

This shows that the Hamas insurgency, using the Strip’s hundreds of miles of tunnels, is still fierce and ongoing. “Five Israeli soldiers were killed in combat in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army admitted on Tuesday, in one of the deadliest days for Israeli forces in the devastated Palestinian territory this year,” regional media reports.

The five soldiers “fell during combat in the northern Gaza Strip,” the IDF announced. In total 14 others were wounded. Included were two that were severely wounded and “evacuated to a hospital to receive medical treatment.” 

They came under attack near Beit Hanoun in the north of Gaza,when improvised explosive devices were detonated, after which Israeli soldiers who sought to rescue the wounded came under fire again. Thus it’s clear that either Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants set a trap and ambush for the soldiers.

The IDF and Israeli media have described that the infantry troops were operating on foot when the blast happened. One detail which highlights the ongoing extreme difficulty of uprooting the Palestinian insurgency is that the area where the attack occurred was subject of Israeli aerial raids just prior:

The military said the area where the attack took place was targeted from the air ahead of the troops’ operations.

The Netzah Yehuda soldiers were operating under the Gaza Division’s Northern Brigade as part of a fresh offensive with the 646th Reserve Paratroopers Brigade in Beit Hanoun, which began on Saturday, aimed at clearing the area of terror operatives who remain holed up there.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid wrote on X in the wake of the large-scale casualties, “For the sake of the fighters, for the sake of their families, for the sake of the hostages, for the sake of the State of Israel: this war must be ended.”

Israeli society has remained fiercely divided over Netanyahu policy, with hostage victims’ family members outraged that efforts to negotiate a deal to release the remaining captives have completely stalled.

Meanwhile, there is some activity on this front, with Qatar’s foreign ministry on Tuesday saying that renewed indirect negotiations will “need time”. The White House has been supportive of peace efforts, but has sided with Israeli actions in Gaza time and again in its public rhetoric.

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