Israeli soldiers moving through the Gaza Strip - Photo credit: Telegram: Documenting Israel
The rains lash down on stricken Gaza, droplets falling across the tiny sliver of land on the corner of the Mediterranean coast, washing away the dust of the shattered buildings and the blood spilt. For the Palestinian refugees uprooted by the ferocious war between Israel and Hamas, pounded relentlessly by Israeli air raids, the water and cold winds bring nothing but misery and cold as floodwaters gush into wooden and plastic sheeted tents and homes destroyed by fighting. Sodden, wet and surrounded by sewage and rubbish, the misery of those displaced on the strip’s wet sands draws on and deepens with each passing day of war, as starvation and sickness spread. The rains have made it difficult to bury the thousands of dead in overflowing morgues and squalor. In Jabila refugee camp, one man carries a small body wrapped in a cotton cloth, wading through the brown floodwaters, rain pouring down. Knee-deep in the water, the man’s young face is torn with grief as he cries out to the open heavens. The little girl's lifeless body gently lolls as the desolated man trudges through the floodwater careful not to drop her. She is one of thousands of children killed in Israel’s campaign of cathartic vengeance, washed away by the inhumanity of war and extinguished by the black hearts driving the world’s most intractable conflict.
The images and footage that has spilled from Gaza and Israel since October 7 are something from a nightmare. The numbers never quite capture the savagery of war, but they tell their own grim story. It is the single deadliest round of fighting in the long history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which can be traced back to the First World War. As of writing, more than 23,000 Palestinian men, women, and children have been killed, over eight thousand are missing and over 57,000 have been wounded, the majority of the casualties being women and children. 85% of buildings in northern Gaza have been damaged or destroyed while in the south the Israeli military has decimated 25% of infrastructure so far, leaving large parts of the strip destroyed. More than 85% of the Palestinian population in Gaza has been displaced with the World Food Programme warning that half a million men, women, and children are at risk of famine after only three months of war. With 96% of Gaza’s water already undrinkable and its underdeveloped water and sewage infrastructure in tatters, scabies, gastrointestinal, fungus, and infectious diseases are spreading and the risk of a mass outbreak of cholera is growing.
For the Israelis, the conflict has exacted a terrible toll. 1,139 Israelis were killed on October 7 when Hamas launched its military campaign with the wave of atrocities it unleashed on Israeli men, women, and children in southern Israel sending shockwaves across the country and marking the single deadliest day for Jews around the world since the Holocaust. Despite an exchange of some hostages taken by Hamas on the opening day of the war, over a hundred who were kidnapped by its operatives and other factions that entered Israel remain captive. The price for the Israeli soldiers going into Gaza has been heavy. In the multiple wars fought in Gaza since 2008, this has been the single costliest military operation for the IDF with over 500 soldiers killed in action and over 2,000 wounded since Hamas’s surprise attack in Black October.
The statistics have been sobering but the nature of the current war in Gaza against the backdrop of the long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has been unprecedented from the start. On October 11, in response to its catastrophic military and intelligence failure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the war cabinet - formed in the wake of the October 7 attacks - promised to “eliminate Hamas” and rescue the hostages. The grim-faced Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, pledged that the army would “wipe this thing called Hamas, ISIS-Gaza, off the face of the earth. It will cease to exist.”
UN experts warned on October 12, mere days after Hamas’s military operation in Israel, that Palestinians were in “grave danger” of ethnic cleansing after the Israeli army issued an order for 1.1 million Palestinians in north Gaza to move to the south within 24 hours. “Israel has already carried out mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the fog of war,” Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory said in reference to the civil war in the Palestinian Mandate. “Again, in the name of self-defence, Israel is seeking to justify what would amount to ethnic cleansing.”
As Israel recovers from the attack on October 7, calls for ethnic cleansing, and in some cases genocidal rhetoric, have reached a fever pitch in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and the minister for national security Ben Gvir have both called for the “resettlement” and “migration” of Palestinians in Gaza to reestablish Israeli settlements in the strip. Israel’s minister of heritage described the destruction of Gaza as “simply a pleasure for the eyes” stating that talks must begin to “hand over lots to all those who fought for Gaza over the years and to those evicted from Gush Katif [a former Israeli settlement in Gaza].” Israel’s minister for transportation emphasised in a televised interview that the Israeli army, in reference to the civil war in the Palestinian Mandate in 1947-1948 which initially displaced Palestinian refugees, was “rolling out the Gaza Nakba”. The Agriculture and Rural Development Minister Avi Dichter, explicitly described the army’s current operation in the Strip as “Nakba 2023.” The Deputy Speaker of the Knesset argued for wiping Gaza from “the face of the earth” while others have called for the strip and its people to be crushed and flattened “without mercy”.
This rhetoric stems right from the top. On October 28, as the Israeli army prepared to go into Gaza, the prime minister delivered a speech clothed in genocidal rhetoric and invoked a war of total destruction and violence against Gaza. Quoting a biblical reference used by Israeli extremists, he said “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember”. Days later, the prime minister referred again to Amalek in a letter to Israeli soldiers and officers writing “Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses”. Soldiers were later captured in Gaza dancing and quoting the prime minister’s speech.
Alongside incitement to genocidal violence, Netanyahu has also been actively lobbying Arab and African countries to accept refugees under “voluntary migration schemes”, threatening to seize control of the Egypt-Gaza border to accomplish this. This is not to ease the humanitarian crisis. In several meetings, according to the Israeli news channel 12, the prime minister has openly said that a “scenario” of “deportation” of Gaza’s residents was being considered while in a meeting at Likud’s party headquarters, he stated, “Our problem is countries that are ready to absorb them and we are working on it…It has strategic importance for the day after the war.” There is little chance these refugees will be able to return to their homes in Gaza from either the Sinai or other parts of the world they are moved to under the so-called “voluntary migration schemes”. As the Israeli government and military seek to deport the Palestinian population, it is determined to make facts on the ground by deepening the suffering of ordinary civilians as it has wielded food, aid, water, and fuel as a weapon of war.
Governments calling for and conducting ethnic cleansing rarely say they are committing ethnic cleansing. After unleashing extraordinary military destruction on Gaza, Netanyahu and other officials, and controversial pieces published in the Israeli press, are using the coded language of ‘voluntary immigration’ in an attempt to eject the Palestinians from Gaza. This comes as the army makes it impossible for civilians to live on the decimated strip by destroying the infrastructure to sustain life, occupying agricultural land, and carving out territory under the cloak of establishing security zones or creating “converted” areas to wage war on Hamas.
As the war in Gaza drags into its third month and since the ground operation has started the IDF’s military operation - brutal from its inception - risks mutating into a campaign of ethnic cleansing, driven by the upper echelons of Israel’s political leadership and military brass, and fanned by a toxic media and social media landscape. With many Israeli commentators, civilians, military officials, and politicians tarring all Palestinian civilians as Hamas or Islamic Jihad, who Israeli officials have repeatedly called “terrorists” and “Nazis”, and Israel in a state of shock following Hamas’s attacks, the consequences are being seen on Gaza’s battlefields.
Israeli soldiers are hunting down men and boys in Gaza and detaining them in makeshift detention centers and warehouses not dissimilar from the Russian filtration camps in Ukraine and Chechnya. Released Palestinians and human rights groups have described torture, degrading treatment, and the brutal beatings of prisoners by Israeli soldiers. Several have allegedly been murdered in these detention centers across the strip and airbases. Reports are also trickling through that Israeli soldiers are carrying out executions and indiscriminate killings of civilians including women, children, and the elderly. At a school in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, Israeli soldiers allegedly executed men, women, and children by “firing at them point-blank.”
According to the UN Human Rights Office, the Israeli army has also disappeared ‘thousands of Palestinian men and boys, and several women and girls’ which, if systematically perpetrated, is considered a crime against humanity. Groups of civilians attempting to return to the parts of the strip have been shot at to deter them from returning, a policy commonly practiced by Israeli soldiers after occupying Palestinian lands since 1948. The mistaken killing of three shirtless Israeli hostages waving white flags - which the IDF later admitted to being an ‘error’ - raised disturbing questions about how Israel’s army is currently treating surrendering Palestinians, many of whom have been targeted in previous operations when ‘displaying or waving white flags when they were in plain view and posed no apparent threat’.
Civilians are not the only target. Journalists, healthcare workers, and aid workers have been targeted with impunity. It is the deadliest conflict for journalists since the Committee to Protect Journalists started gathering data in 1992 while the United Nations has recorded the highest number of casualties among its aid workers since records began.
Israel has flagrantly targeted Gaza’s hospitals. In an investigation conducted by The Washington Post, the attack on the hospital ‘housing hundreds of sick and dying patients and thousands of displaced people has no precedent in recent decades.’ Contrary to the IDF’s claims, which were resolutely defended by US intelligence, that Hamas was using the hospital as a base of operations, ‘none of the rooms connected to the tunnel network discovered by the IDF troops showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas’ and there was ‘no evidence that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards’. According to the UN, at least 40 patients — including four premature babies — died in the days leading up to the raid and its aftermath. The Israeli army’s controversial assault on Al-Shifa hospital is the tip of the iceberg in its utter destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system. Over 300 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza with other hospitals coming under similar assaults that Al-Shifa endured with Nasser Medical Complex and Indonesian Hospital (where the World Health Organisation reported at least 12 patients and companions killed inside the hospital) coming under fire from tanks and snipers.
Death comes from the air with impunity. Israel’s conventional bombing campaign is one of the heaviest in human history as drones and jets pulverise the strip. Refugee camps have been bombed incessantly, killing thousands of men, women, and children. Claims by Israeli officials that these are “mistakes” or that the IDF is taking precautionary measures to minimise civilian casualties cannot be taken seriously. From the very beginning of the war, as stated by IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy”.
Israeli jets have dropped unguided M117 “dumb bombs” in vast quantities with a US intelligence assessment estimating that 40-45% of munitions used in Gaza have been unguided munitions. An investigation by Israeli newspapers +972 magazine and Local Call also revealed that the Israeli army has also expanded its authorisation for targeting non-military targets. It has also loosened constraints regarding expected civilian casualties from ‘dozens of civilian deaths…to hundreds of civilian deaths’, utilising a system called “Habsora” where artificial intelligence “generates” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible.
The result has been massacre after massacre in refugee camps across the desolated strip, perpetrated by murderous Israeli air raids as Gaza has been rendered uninhabitable by the devastating bombing campaign with more than a third of buildings destroyed or damaged. As of day 82 of fighting, 183 mosques, five of Gaza’s six universities in Gaza and over 300 schools have been destroyed. In a sickening act of vandalism, satellite imagery and video footage documented by The New York Times has also shown that Israeli tanks and vehicles have also rolled through at least sixteen cemeteries in Gaza, destroying gravestones, uprooting graves, and exhuming dead bodies.
As with Ukraine and Sudan, Gaza has become a livestream for atrocities. Many Israeli soldiers, not dissimilar to the Bosnian Serbs slaughtering the Bosniaks in the 1990s, have reveled in the savagery unfolding, posting their exploits on social media, which has become a hotbed for genocidal rhetoric, racism, and hate speech. Shops and homes that remain standing have been ransacked or looted with Israeli soldiers documenting the footage themselves. One man on camera in a filmed selfie openly bragged about killing a Palestinian child while others have been taking selfie videos or filming each other abusing and mocking blindfolded prisoners and blowing up Palestinian homes.
A Telegram group called ‘72 Virgins Uncensored’ which was created on October 9 by the Israeli army’s Influencing Department has posted several videos titled ‘Grand Theft Auto: Gaza City’ showing Israeli soldiers going through decimated Palestinian neighborhoods with the theme tune of the video game San Andreas playing in the background. In echoes of the Rwandan genocide perpetrated in 1994, the channel has also repeatedly referred to Hamas operatives and those pictured being incarcerated by the IDF as “cockroaches”, a slur used by the racist Hutu Power party as they slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in 100 days. In the West Bank, the Israeli army was forced to suspend a soldier who was documented lobbing a stun grenade into a mosque and suspend several more filming themselves singing and mocking the Islamic call to prayer over a loudspeaker in places of worship. Another group of Israeli soldiers storming a mosque in Gaza filmed one squad member defecating on the roof of a mosque as they ransacked it while others have posted on social media channels actively calling for settling Israeli civilians where the Palestinian population once lived.
There is no turning back after the war in Gaza for the Israelis or Palestinians. Hamas’s initial assault in southern Israel has irrevocably changed the country. The war, from Hamas’s surprise attack to the failure of Israeli intelligence to anticipate the assault to the barbaric destruction of Gaza, has been an utter disaster for the Israeli government and the military hierarchy. Hamas’s initial victory punctured the status quo and humiliated the strongest army in the Middle East and its intelligence agencies while simultaneously dismantling Donald Trump and Netanyahu’s strategy of making peace with its Arab neighbors without the Palestinians. Hamas has also baited the Israeli army into a brutal guerrilla war for which it has long prepared where it has conducted hit-and-run attacks on Israeli soldiers using its network of tunnels across the strip and the rubble of destroyed cities to harass the IDF.
Contrary to the belief that collective punishment of Palestinian men, women, and children would deter support for Hamas, the group’s popularity has soared in Gaza and the West Bank as its rival, the Palestinian Authority, has buckled under accusations of cronyism and corruption. The fantasy nurtured by US officials that the Palestinian Authority, already unpopular in Gaza will govern the destroyed enclave at the behest of Netanyahu’s government is unlikely to come to fruition. The Israelis will certainly systematically downgrade Hamas’s military wing and that of Islamic Jihad, but it will neither destroy its jihadist ideology nor its commitment to Palestinian nationalism. With time running out, and international pressure growing on the Israelis, the IDF is unlikely to kill all the estimated 20,000-30,000 fighters in the strip or its fighters and supporters in Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, and beyond. The IDF has neither destroyed Hamas nor rescued all the hostages (and in some cases has killed them accidentally) and has no long-term strategy for what comes after the war in Gaza ends. Parallel to its political and military failures in Gaza, Netanyahu’s government is courting a disastrous war across the Middle East with Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen that risks pulling the Western powers into a regional conflagration with Israel.
What Israel has is a pyrrhic victory at best. It has razed Gaza to the ground, an act that will radicalise a generation of Palestinians as well as many Arabs and young Muslims around the world, empowering Shia and Salafi-jihadist extremists on its doorstep. Where it has downgraded Hamas’s Qassam operatives today, Netanyahu and the IDF have played into the group’s hands by going on a vengeful killing spree in Gaza which has isolated Israel from its allies in the Middle East and turned the country into a pariah state as it commits war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
More consequentially, in the words of Britain’s former Defence Minister, Ben Wallace, Netanyahu’s horrific campaign is likely to extend the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for another five decades. In the wake of the October 7 attacks and the brutal war in Gaza, this is a frightening prospect. Israel will take years, perhaps decades, to recover from the worst year in its history, and with broadening support for ethnonationalism and religious extremists in Israeli society, the tragedy of October 7 will be wielded as a weapon to justify more violence, seize more Palestinian territory and extend the military occupation.
Israelis and Palestinians stand at a fork in the road. The costs of Israel’s victory in 1967 and its unwillingness to relinquish control of the Occupied Palestinian Territories while expanding its settlements on Palestinian land have never been starker. Hamas may have orchestrated the catastrophic attacks on October 7 but the darkest day in Israeli history is also the culmination of Netanyahu’s toxic thirty-year tenure at the top of Israeli politics. Where he goes, only corruption, chaos, and death have followed and he has exploited and manipulated Israel and Palestine’s ugliest forces for brazen political opportunism. Today, he has never been weaker. Facing a trial for alleged corruption, one which could land him in prison, he is widely seen as responsible for the intelligence failures that led to Hamas’s attacks in October. Extending the war, even sparking a regional war with Iran, and placating the extremists in his far-right government could be a benefit to the besieged strongman who is determined to stay in office whatever the cost to his own country.
The repercussions of allowing Israel’s war in Gaza to continue will reverberate beyond Israel and Palestine. By binding themselves to Netanyahu’s poisonous government and its cultish supporters abroad, offering his extremist coalition unconditional military and political support, and turning a blind eye to some (not all) Israeli voices that are, irrefutably, calling for ethnic cleansing and genocide against Palestinians, the United States and its western allies are becoming complicit in one of the 21st century’s greatest crimes.
The ramifications of what happens in Gaza will be felt beyond the Middle East. The crisis has served as the perfect distraction for Vladimir Putin’s Russia waging war on Ukraine and damaged the credibility of the Western powers attempting to rally support for Kyiv as countries in the “global south” accuse Joe Biden and his allies of double standards in the application of international norms. Netanyahu’s repugnant leadership and attempt to ethnically cleanse Gaza has not occurred in a vacuum. The Israel-Hamas war is the legacy of successive Israeli governments who have been repeatedly unwilling to relinquish almost total control of Palestinian lives and rights, failed to face down illegal settlement expansion on occupied lands, and turned a blind eye to the rise of unfettered Jewish supremacism and racism that has taken hold of Israel’s mainstream political landscape.
Hamas was disgorged by military occupation, a fact admitted by former Israeli officials, and nurtured as an alternative to other Palestinian factions, extremists, and insurgents fighting the Israeli occupation in the 1980s and 1990s. Hamas draws support from Hezbollah, Iran, and other nefarious and brutal states and non-state actors, but what fuels its cause and ideology is the Israelis’ perpetual occupation of Palestinian territory and the far-right’s dismantling of the two-state solution. Absent basic human rights, living in poverty, facing daily rituals of humiliation and incarceration, and with no prospect of a state, many Palestinians have inevitably turned to the gun and Hamas to fight the military occupation, as others have done in other occupations in Chechnya, Kashmir, Iraq and beyond. Israel’s military occupation may be one of the most controversial in history but is hardly exceptional in how they function and how those being repressed eventually respond.
So long as Israel maintains its military occupation, it will never know peace with its neighbors. To end this long cycle of violence means turning inwards. Whether or not Netanyahu realises his dream of a full-fledged campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the dreadful crime would only delay the inevitable reckoning with the destructive ideologies that have driven Israel’s quest for security, underpinned the formation of the Jewish State since 1948 and justified its brutal subjugation of the Palestinians.
Without that confrontation, Israel risks living behind walls, bitterly divided, stained by the atrocities it has unleashed on Gaza and the West Bank, and traumatised by the actions of Hamas on October 7. In a one-state reality, absent a two-state solution, and ruling as an apartheid state over the Palestinians, such a path courts only disaster and sows the seeds of Israel’s self-destruction. The international community must not only save the Israelis and Palestinians from each other, it must part Israel from its waltz with Netanyahu and his cabal of extremists who threaten to take the country into the abyss.