Tel Aviv has Turned Gaza into a Zone of Horror and Death

(This is the first of a three-part series. The other articles can be found in Part 2 and Part 3.)

By Argiris Malapanis and Geoff Mirelowitz

November 28, 2023 — “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. Hamas will no longer exist. We will eliminate everything,” Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said as the Israeli assault began.

“We are now rolling out the Gaza nakba,” Israeli agriculture minister Avi Dichter said in a television interview on November 11. “Gaza nakba 2023.”

Nakba, “catastrophe” in Arabic, is a Palestinian term for the harrowing violence, mass expulsions, and expropriation of indigenous Palestinian land by the Zionist armies during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. A war that resulted in a colonial settler state in Israel.

Speaking on TV, Dichter made clear that the unity cabinet he is serving has launched Israel’s war on Gaza to force further mass dispossession of Palestinians.

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A chorus of prominent Israelis have echoed such inflammatory language since the October 7 Hamas attack that killed some 1,200 Jews and others, then kidnapped and dragged into Gaza about 250 people. The hostages are Jews, Bedouins, and visitors or immigrant workers from other countries. It was the worst slaughter of Jews on a single day since the Nazi holocaust.

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Hostage and prisoner exchange

As of November 28, a temporary truce was in effect between Israel and Hamas to facilitate the release of hostages Hamas took in its October 7 attack and Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. 

The deal, mediated by Qatar, has resulted in the release of 85 hostages held by Hamas and 180 Palestinian prisoners. Israel has also allowed some additional humanitarian aid — far from what is necessary — to enter Gaza. The hostages Hamas let go include 17 Thais, one Filipino, and three dual Israeli-Russian citizens, who were released under separate negotiations. 

The Israeli government also announced it will extend the fighting pause by a day for every 10 more hostages released and will let go more Palestinian prisoners during any new exchanges.

Tel Aviv, however, has made it clear that the ceasefire will last no more than 10 days, and that it will resume the war the moment the swaps end.

[Update: The truce ended on December 1, 2023, and the war resumed. During the seven-day pause, Hamas released 134 hostages, mostly Israelis. In exchange, Tel Aviv let go about 400 Palestinian prisoners.]

Argiris Malapanis & Geoff Mirelowitz

A November 15 New York Times article, ‘Erase Gaza’: War Unleashes Incendiary Rhetoric in Israel, documented in detail calls to “flatten” or “erase” Gaza, and even a nuclear annihilation of the territory, that have echoed loudly across Israel. The rhetoric dehumanizes Palestinians who are alleged to be “animals,” or even lesser beings, virtually all of whom are “terrorists.”

The language is extreme. Some may view it as a common excess of wartime. But coupled with Tel Aviv’s ongoing disregard for the humanitarian catastrophe the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have created in Gaza, it corroborates the course Dichter, Gallant, and others have outlined.

Gaza increasingly becomes a ‘death zone’

Al Shifa, the largest hospital in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, has become a “death zone,” said the World Health Organization (WHO) after a United Nations (UN) team visited the medical facility on November 18.

By November 20, Israeli soldiers had taken control of the entire al Shifa compound, rendering it inoperable, while the IDF was shelling the Indonesian Hospital, another medical facility in northern Gaza.

The Israeli military says Hamas was using al Shifa and other medical centers as command posts. But the IDF has so far offered scant evidence to back up its claim.

Other scenes of unspeakable destruction, with entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble, now dot Gaza. Schools, residential buildings, ambulance convoys, and even fleeing civilians have been hit by Israeli warplanes, tanks, and artillery. Photos and satellite maps published by the Financial Times, Al Mayadeen, and other news outlets show more than half of northern Gaza’s buildings have been wrecked by the Israeli assault.

The death toll now exceeds 15,000 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children. The vast majority are civilians, as the IDF itself claims to have killed roughly 1,000 of the estimated 30,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza. Another 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been injured, many of them seriously.

Seven weeks of war have left about 0.7% of Gaza’s population dead. That’s more than the share of the U.S. population killed in all of World War II — over four years.

“U.S. officials said Israel’s rapid decision to launch ground operations in the enclave left Israeli commanders little time for extensive planning to mitigate risks to civilians and all but guaranteed a high civilian death toll,” said a November 18 New York Times article. Coming from U.S. officials, this statement gives the lie to Israeli claims of minimizing civilian casualties.

Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace, read the headline of a front-page article in the November 25 New York Times. “In less than two months, more than twice as many women and children have already been reported killed in Gaza than confirmed killed in Ukraine,” after two years of war, the article said.

“It is not just the scale of the strikes — Israel said it had engaged more than 15,000 targets before reaching a brief cease-fire in recent days. It is also the nature of the weaponry itself,” the Times article continued.

“Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say.”

The article quoted Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. “It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” Garlasco said. “To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area,” he added, we may “have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.”

Fresh evidence of the danger can be found even in the midst of the temporary pause in the fighting as Hamas and Israel exchange hostages and prisoners. Palestinians who have fled northern Gaza attempted to travel “back to the homes they fled to see if they were still intact, to check on relatives left behind and, in some cases, to finally bury their dead,” the New York Times reported on November 25.

“Israeli forces on the ground opened fire on them, according to witnesses, an Egyptian official and some of those injured,” the Times continued. The report then observed with chilling accuracy, “For Gazans, not being allowed to return home even temporarily during a pause in the fighting fed their fears that Israel plans to displace them permanently, as happened in 1948 during the war surrounding Israel’s creation.”

According to the United Nations, 1.7 million of the 2.3 million residents in the small enclave have already been displaced.

“Mohammed El-Sabti said he began a trek from the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza City on a recent morning with 15 family members, including his elderly mother,” reported the November 28 New York Times. “He saw another older woman screaming by the side of the road. She begged him for help, but Mr. El-Sabti was struggling with the load he was already carrying while he pushed his mother on a cart.”

“The corridor is not humanitarian, and it’s unsafe,” El-Sabti told the Times, referring to the evacuation route from the north to the strip’s southern part. “It’s an area of horror.”

The comparison to the Nakba, the mass dispossession of Palestinians during the wars surrounding the founding of Israel, were not far from people’s minds, Imad Ziyadeh, another Palestinian who fled south to Khan Younis from near Beit Lahia, told the Times. “In 1948, we were displaced, and now in 2023 we are being subjected to a forced displacement,” Ziyadeh said. “I’m not expecting to go back to north Gaza, but if they do make us go back, what will we go back to?”

These are among the criminal results of Israel’s policy of collective punishment of the Palestinian population in Gaza, using the barbarity of Hamas as justification. The scale and sweeping character of the Israeli assault — with no end in sight — threatens to match, or exceed, the Nakba of 1948 when more than 700,000 people fled or were forcibly expelled from their homes.

From north to south: ‘Make Gaza impossible to live in’

Israel has forced most Palestinians to flee northern Gaza. But its forces are now ramping up strikes on the southern part of the strip, where hundreds of thousands of evacuees have crowded.

“Heavy Israeli bombardments struck both north and south Gaza, killing more civilians and once again bringing hospitals into the crossfire on Monday [November 20] as the conflict entered its 45th day with few signs of letup or a cease-fire,” reported the November 20 Washington Post.

“The dire conditions were compounded by storms that raged across the seaside enclave and dumped cold rain on the hundreds of thousands of displaced people who have been living in makeshift shelters and tents to escape the fighting.”

There may well be worse to come. After taking control of much of northern Gaza, the IDF has now called on Palestinians to evacuate southern Gaza’s largest urban areas — particularly the cities of Khan Younis and Rafah — threatening to unleash its war there next.

“Israeli warplanes in recent days have dropped leaflets in southern Gaza encouraging residents to flee to an even smaller area called al-Mawasi, a ribbon of farmland about half a mile wide and 9 miles long along the Mediterranean coastline,” reported the November 20 Wall Street Journal. “Israel says it wants to set up a safe ‘humanitarian zone’ in the area, while U.N. officials have said the idea is unworkable.”

A more accurate description of this Israeli plan would be a concentration camp. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.

Some Israeli officials concede it would be impossible to corral two million Palestinians into al-Mawasi — an area smaller than the size of the Los Angeles International Airport, and equal to about 3% of the entire Gaza Strip. But the invasion of the south will undoubtedly force hundreds of thousands more Palestinians out of their homes or temporary shelters, as the assault on the north has already done.

On October 9, retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland wrote in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” He added, “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieving the goal.”

In another article, Eiland wrote that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”

The weeks since confirm that Eiland offered an accurate description of the goals and results of Israel’s war.

Washington enables Israel’s killing fields

The flow of U.S. weaponry and other assistance enables Israel’s killing fields.

Since the 1970s, the U.S. government has provided at least $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel, the most such assistance than to any country per year, with the recent exception of Ukraine.

The Biden administration dispatched military advisers to Israel and authorized the sale to Tel Aviv of precision-guided bomb equipment and other sophisticated weapons and munitions, now raining death and destruction on Gaza. It has also requested that the U.S. Congress authorize an additional $14 billion in aid to Tel Aviv.

The U.S. Air Force has been flying MQ-9 “hunter-killer” and other military surveillance drones over Gaza daily, allegedly to aid efforts to free the hostages Hamas and its allies are holding in Gaza. But the extent of these U.S. operations and the indispensable information they make possible to share with Israel is not publicly known.

The U.S. Navy has dispatched two aircraft carrier groups to the Mediterranean, near Israel’s coastline. With this force of 15,000 sailors, “the U.S. wants to create a naval bubble around Israel,” said an October 27 dispatch in the French daily Le Monde.

The deployment is a warning that the U.S. military is ready to strike any forces in the region — such as Hezbollah in Lebanon or other Iran-backed militias in Syria, Iraq, or Yemen — if they spark a regional conflagration or inflict serious casualties on U.S. troops deployed throughout the Middle East.

Washington and Tel Aviv do not share identical interests. The White House has publicly offered full support for Israel’s war. At the same time, the U.S. government has pressed Israel to allow pauses in the fighting to allow civilians to flee besieged areas or permit some humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. Israel has rejected much of that advice.

Biden and other U.S. officials have also repeated calls for a “two-state” solution, occasionally uttered meager warnings of increasing right-wing settler violence in the occupied territories, and proposed that the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank should administer Gaza once the war there comes to an end.

On November 11, however, Netanyahu “unequivocally ruled out the idea of allowing the authority to control Gaza after the war,” Josh Paul wrote in a November 17 New York Times opinion essay.

Paul is a former director in the U.S. State Department’s political-military affairs bureau, which oversees U.S. arms transfers. His essay explained his resignation from the State Department over disagreement with new weapons sales to Israel for the Gaza war.

This infusion of billions of aid to Tel Aviv outweighs any words Biden or his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken may speak to caution Israel. No one knows this better than Netanyahu and the Israeli unity government.

Regardless of U.S. criticism, Israel seems determined to push its own strategy. That has already resulted in the dispossession of most Palestinians from their remaining lands in Gaza. The possibility that Israel will seek a similar outcome in the West Bank at some future moment cannot be excluded.

Killings, land grab on rise in West Bank

Relentless Israeli brutality is on the rise in the West Bank. The territory, occupied by Israel since the 1967 six-day war, is home to some 3 million Palestinians and roughly half a million Jewish settlers. In the majority Arab East Jerusalem another 220,000 Israeli settlers reside.

Violence in the West Bank is reaching its highest levels in years. Heavily armed right-wing settlers have operated with impunity in the territory for decades.

Since October 7, these assaults have become bolder, deadlier, and more frequent. More than 200 Palestinians have been killed there — including about 50 children — eight by settlers and the rest in clashes with the Israeli army. In the last two months, settler violence has displaced more than 1,000 Palestinians in 16 rural areas, including entire herding communities. Israeli forces have also arrested more than 2,000 Palestinians.

These figures don’t give the full story of the ways in which the Zionist occupiers terrorize Palestinians. The frightening violence includes uprooting olive trees from Palestinian lands, vandalizing property, arsons, beatings, shootings, as well as construction of roads and outposts that the settlers, and sometimes the army, use to connect settlements and outposts to control travel.

“The strategy is: We are here, this land belongs to us, and we will kick you off it, with all the means we have,” said Dov Sedaka, a reserve Israeli general who now works for a foundation that supports Israeli-Palestinian cooperation. “It’s awful,” he added.

The settlers operate with the tacit approval, or open backing, of the Israeli occupying army.

“Since the war started more than a month ago,” said Ali Awad in a November 20 New York Times opinion essay, “the settlers and soldiers in the region seemed to have fused into one entity, ending whatever semblance of distance existed between these two violent systems.” Awad lives in Tuba, a rural community in the West Bank.

“Settlers whom we recognize from years of harassment in our villages have suddenly become soldiers, as reservists or as part of Itamar Ben-Gvir’s civilian security teams,” Awad continued. Ben-Gvir, a far-right politician, is now Israel’s minister of national security.

“In my village and in other villages around us, settlers have been raiding homes and harassing us relentlessly, sometimes multiple times a day,” Awad wrote. “For those of us in Tuba, this wave of attacks is part of a long string of attempts to force us to leave our homes. And it’s not only the settlers who want us out: Successive Israeli governments have also tried to get rid of us over the last decades.”

For now, it appears the settlers and their military backers are pushing around the edges, targeting the most geographically isolated Palestinians. In the major West Bank population centers a far more challenging campaign would be necessary to expel Palestinians from their homes and their land.

Zionist meaning of ‘From the river to the sea’

This much is certain, however: Hamas seeks a land free of Jews from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The most aggressive Zionists dream of that same land free of Palestinians. Perhaps not free of them completely. Because expelling Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, about 20% of Israel’s population of 9.5 million (a significantly greater share than African Americans represent in the United States), would be an even more extreme measure than complete colonization of the West Bank.

Nevertheless, the genocidal nature of the war on Gaza poses the danger that the most right-wing Israelis will continue working toward further dispossession of most Palestinians, while relegating those who remain to permanent second-class status, or worse.

For many supporters of the Palestinian national liberation struggle around the world, the slogan “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” does not have the meaning Hamas ascribes to it. It rather expresses the desire for freedom for all Palestinians, in Gaza, the West Bank, and inside Israel. It does not preclude the possibility of Arabs and Jews living together on the same lands with equal rights.

But before “From the river to the sea…” became popular as a slogan of Palestinian resistance, the Zionist version of that slogan was enshrined as the opening point in Likud’s platform.

Likud is Israel’s ruling party today. It has led the Israeli government for most of the last 20 years, after previous stints at Israel’s helm for much of the 1980s and from 1996 to 1999.

“The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel,” the Likud program reads, “is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty” (emphasis added).

Likud’s political program and practice indicate that the quest for a Jewish state free of most Palestinians “from the river to the sea” is not just a dream of ultra-rightist Zionist zealots. It’s the explicit goal of a dominant section of the Israeli ruling class.

Crackdown on democratic rights inside Israel

Inside Israel, the Netanyahu government has used the declaration of war, which has substantial popular support today, to unleash a widespread crackdown on free speech and other democratic rights.

“Since the October 7th attack, Palestinians and peace activists in Israel have increasingly been targeted by employers, universities, government authorities, and right-wing mobs,” reported the November 8 issue of the New Yorker magazine, in the article Inside the Israeli Crackdown on Speech.

“The Jewish Israeli activists,” New Yorker writer Masha Gessen continued, “invariably noted that their troubles paled in comparison to the punishment their government was inflicting on Palestinians — in Gaza, certainly, and in the occupied West Bank, but also inside Israel. While Jewish activists are targeted by right-wing mobs with what appears to be the tacit approval of the government, Palestinians experience the full force of the government’s repressive apparatus.”

Much of Israel’s civilian life is on pause at the moment, Gessen wrote. “Universities have postponed the start of the school year; courts are not hearing cases, except for urgent matters such as arrests,” the article said.

“Many of the people who are being detained on what amounts to suspicion of disloyalty may never be charged, but the courts are effectively meting out punishment by placing people under arrest. The Adalah legal center is monitoring more than a hundred and seventy cases, the majority of which involve Palestinian citizens of Israel.”

“These are people who are systematically discriminated against in education, employment, and public services. Still, many of them attend Hebrew-language universities and work in predominantly Jewish Israeli institutions. In the past few weeks, hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel have been suspended from universities or fired from their jobs,” Gessen wrote.

(This was the first of a three-part series. The other articles can be found in Part 2 and Part 3.)

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