Israel has launched a ground assault, including tanks, into the Gaza city of Deir al-Balah, the last remaining city in the Strip that has largely avoided devastation. The Associated Press puts the incursion in context:
“Tens of thousands of people have sought refuge in Deir al-Balah during repeated waves of mass displacement in Gaza.
“The U.N. humanitarian coordinator says 87.8% of Gaza is now under evacuation orders or inside Israeli military zones, “leaving 2.1 million civilians squeezed into a fragmented 12 per cent of the Strip, where essential services have collapsed.”
“Israel has taken over large areas of Gaza and split the territory with corridors stretching from the border to the sea as it seeks to pressure Hamas to release more hostages.”
The move comes after Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Mossad Director, David Barnea, visited Washington for discussions with President Trump. According to Axios, the topic of discussion was the evacuation of the Palestinians in Gaza. The report indicated that the Netanyahu government was talking with Ethiopia, Indonesia and Libya as possible evacuation sites. According to Axios:
- Israel has been developing a plan for moving all two million residents of the enclave to a small “humanitarian zone” near the border with Egypt.
- That plan has sparked concerns in Egypt and many Western countries that Israel is preparing for the mass displacement of Palestinians out of Gaza, something Netanyahu’s ultranationalist coalition partners and many inside his own party have been pushing for years.
- A senior Israeli official claimed that, as part of the understandings with the three countries, the transfer of Palestinians would be “voluntary and not forced,” and that Israel would commit to allowing any Palestinian who leaves to return to Gaza at any time.
There is no question that the forced removal of civilians from the Gaze Strip is a war crime. But what is more unsettling is that the Netanyahu government either believes that the evacuation could be voluntary or that, after at least 59,000 people dying, that any person could believe that the Palestinians have many choices.
The other part of the Netanyahu strategy to encourage “voluntary” evacuation is to starve the Palestinians to death. Israel refuses to allow humanitarian groups to distribute any food, water, or fuel to the Palestinians. Instead, Israel relies upon a corrupt organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, to distribute aid in places where the civilian population can be better controlled. There have been a substantial number of Palestinians killed at these distribution centers as Israeli troops have fired upon them because starving people started looting the supplies. I am not sure what the Netanyahu government considers appropriate behavior under the circumstances. Soumaya Ghannoushi describes the situation:
“Razan Abu Zaher died starving.
“She was four years old.
“She died on the floor of a collapsing hospital, her tiny ribs rising and falling like wings too fragile to lift. Her body had no fat left to burn. Her eyes had sunken. Her voice – once a whisper of laughter – had long since vanished.
“She did not die quickly. She died slowly.
“She died watched by her mother, who begged her to hold on. Watched by a doctor who had no more syringes, no more saline, no more words, and by a world that tuned in – then turned away.
“Her death was not a tragedy. It was a sentence, written not in haste, but in policy.
“Razan is not alone. She is one of thousands.
“Between March and June – well into the total blockade – the UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNRWA, screened over 74,000 children in Gaza. More than 5,500 were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition. Over 800 were already critical.
“That was months after food was declared a threat. After flour became contraband and milk became memory, now children die in their parents’ arms.
This atrocity is not an accident nor is it merely a sad attribute of what often happens in war. Starvation is a deliberate policy to encourage “voluntary” emigration. Peter Beinart explains the policy well:
“Right. This freedom — phrase “freedom to choose” is so Orwellian. First of all, what kind of freedom is it when you have a territory where most of the buildings and the hospitals and the schools and the bakeries and the agriculture have all been destroyed, where you have more child amputees than any other place on Earth? And now you’re talking about people’s freedom to choose?
“The deeper irony is that Palestinians have actually been — in Gaza and beyond, have been asking for the freedom to choose, the real freedom to choose, since 1948, because the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are not from Gaza. They were expelled from their homes in what’s now Israel. Many of them can see the lands from which they were — their families were expelled in 1948. So, they do want the freedom to choose. They want the freedom to return to the places from which their families were expelled.”
Israel could not be conducting this slaughter without the active support of the United States. Israelis and Americans both have the blood of innocents on their hands for allowing their governments to commit the slaughter. Netanyahu has consistently prevented the implementation of a ceasefire and the return of the hostages so that he can continue the process of ethnic cleansing. Once the hostages are released, the Israeli people will be able to turn their total attention to the atrocity being committed in the name of self-defense. This war stopped being a war of self defense many months ago. It is now another chapter in the brutal and sordid history of imperialism.
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