The following is an opinion column published in the Israeli daily Haaretz on August 21, 2025.

The author, Amira Hass, is the Haaretz correspondent for the occupied territories — Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel has illegally held since the Six-Day War in June 1967.

Born in Jerusalem in 1956, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Hass joined Haaretz in 1989. She has been in her current position since 1993. While carrying out her assignment, she spent three years living in Gaza, which served as the basis for her widely acclaimed book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege. She has lived in the West Bank city of Ramallah since 1997.

As the introduction to an October 19, 2023, Democracy Now interview with Hass noted, she is “the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank.”

World-Outlook recently published another remarkable article by Hass, West Bank: Israeli Soldiers ‘Do Whatever They Want’.

In the opinion column that follows, Hass describes frankly the coming slaughter the Israel Defense Forces are about to unleash in Gaza City, as they get ready to force 1.5 million Palestinians crowded there to the Strip’s south — with the goal of eventually expelling from Gaza as many of its 2.3 million inhabitants as they can.

As Hass correctly notes, “No one is saving the Palestinians, the hostages, or us from our own repulsive self.”

Coupled with the Israeli government’s decision to build a new massive settlement cutting the West Bank in two — and effectively killing any hopes for an independent and contiguous Palestinian state — the impending Gaza City assault shows that the criminals running the halls of power in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are drunk with executing more and more of their Nazi-like dreams.

The ultra-rightist Israeli regime is enabled, first and foremost, by the unwavering military, economic, and political support of the U.S. government and many of its European allies, and the effective indifference, at best, of most of the Arab regimes in the region.

As Hass puts it in concluding her column, these governments are “complicit in crime — against our will.”

World-Outlook is publishing the column below for the information of our readers. The headline, subhead, photos, and text below are from the original.

— World-Outlook editors

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Haaretz | Opinion

Europe and Arab States Are Asleep. Soon, Anything That Moves in Gaza City Will Be Killed

Imagine your friends, forced to flee for at least the eighth time – hungry, grieving, running from shells. As Gaza is emptied by bombs and bulldozers, Israeli silence is another form of violence.

By Amira Hass

Aug 22, 2025, 12:08 am IDT

My friends in Gaza will likely soon be ordered to “evacuate” from their makeshift shelters and be “absorbed” into the southern part of the Gaza Strip – just as my parents were once “evacuated and absorbed”: my mother to Bergen-Belsen, my father to a ghetto in Transnistria.

The army’s flattened language of lies pollutes every report, every discussion. This is not my exhausted, starving friends’ problem. It is ours, the Israelis’. So is the outcry of the willfully blind and hard-hearted who insist: “You should never compare.”

The Minister of War, Israel Katz, made a promise, and he’s keeping it: The mission of moving and transporting, concentrating and crowding, compressing and crushing hundreds of thousands more human beings into a tiny scrap of land in Gaza’s south is going ahead, undeterred by protests, condemnations or historical parallels.

No one is saving the Palestinians, the hostages, or us from our own repulsive self.

I write, still hoping for a miracle. That Europe and the Arab states will wake up. That they’ll use the real levers of power they actually hold.

Our heroic pilots’ bombings, our brave tank commanders’ shelling, will ensure Gaza City is emptied of its people and crushed in the jaws of bulldozers driven by the jubilant, God-fearing Zarviv-ites.

The Israeli soldiers are imbued with values, raised to perform meaningful military service. Even those who protest alongside their parents and the hostages’ families against the government do not refuse the draft or disobey orders.

When Southern Command Chief Yaniv Asor declares Gaza City a “criminalized zone,” every soldier will be licensed to shoot anything that moves. Even a 78-year-old woman. Even her 12-year-old grandson.

I can already hear the unshaken saying: It’s their fault; they were given time to evacuate south.

The Kaplan Street protesters have one remaining lever to derail the decisive plans of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, plans bound up in the Putin-style regime overhaul: a mass refusal to participate in these campaigns of destruction and expulsion.

But they don’t pull it. For them, the flag is never black enough.

My limited imagination does not allow me to picture my friends and their families – gaunt, sick, grieving – being expelled for what must be at least the eighth time, stumbling into yet another unknown, to a stretch of land even smaller and more crowded than the one before. In a cart? On foot for 20 kilometers? Running, breathless, while shells chase them, columns of black smoke and dust rising behind them?

My terrified imagination refuses to see them staying behind in half-destroyed homes, despite the horror-show advice of IDF spokesperson Avichay Adraee, praying instead for a quick death by bombing.

Their apartments in and around the refugee camps, built and bought with years of salaries, have become smoking, crumbling walls. From the few things they’ve managed to scavenge or improvise since the last expulsion – mattresses, pots and ladles, planks, blankets, maybe a solar panel – what will they be forced to leave behind this time?

Surely not the sack of flour they bought for 1,000 shekels. Not the jerrycan with 20 liters of half-purified water. Not the diapers for their 90-year-old mother.

My inadequate imagination can’t fathom where, between all the tents packed tight, they will pitch their own.

Where they’ll sweat until winter comes, then shiver to the bone as rain and the rising sea soak them, between one round of shelling and the next. And the drones above will buzz on and on, day and night.

Terror. Longing. Hunger. Thirst. Itchy skin. Pain. Rage. Exhaustion. A sick child crying. The letters are the same, but in Gaza, they carry a weight, a substance, a volume that’s beyond our comprehension.

The words have fallen from my dictionary – except for these entries: “helplessness,” “paralysis” and also, “complicit in crime – against our will.”

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