The Israeli military conducting operations in Gaza. Image via Telegram: Documenting Israel.
The war is entering one of its grimmest phases as the Israeli army tightens its grip on northern Gaza and enacts a ‘scaled down’ version of a plan to turn Gaza City, including refugee camps such as Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia and Jabalia, into a closed ‘military zone’ emptied of Palestinian residents. Over 42,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 100,000 wounded, though these figures are likely to be a vast undercount since Israel’s campaign in Gaza began and has since morphed into genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The situation on the ground is hellish. According to Medecins Sans Frontiers, humanitarian aid has been cut off from northern Gaza since the beginning of October with the Israeli army enacting its plan to strangle starved refugee camps of supplies and force them to leave. The man-made starvation in the north is not a byproduct of war, but a policy of the army as civilians refuse to leave the area as it struggles to uproot Hamas’ operatives that continue to fight in the north of the strip. “Remove the entire civilian population from the north,” Uzi Rabi, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University said in an interview with 103FM, eluding to the current offensive being waged by the army. “Whoever remains there will be lawfully sentenced as a terrorist and subjected to a process of starvation or extermination.”
As with any insurgency, the tactics of the Israelis have become increasingly brutal. In December 2023, the army’s spokesperson Daniel Hagari claimed that the Israelis were entering ‘the final stages of operational control’ in northern Gaza. Nearly a year on from this statement, the reality is far different with the army. Only this week, three reservists were killed in the Jabalia refugee camp, adding to the hundreds of Israeli soldiers killed in a year-long campaign to eliminate Hamas, and the hundreds killed during Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 which killed nearly 1,200 Israelis.
The Islamist militants are replenishing their numbers and rebuilding the honeycomb of tunnels damaged by the Israeli's devastating bombardment. The Israeli army unable to uproot them, have launched increasingly murderous raids, the most notorious being a ferocious assault turned massacre at Al-Shifa hospital in March as reports emerged of small Hamas cells regrouping in the north of the strip. After fierce fighting, more than 380 bodies were discovered in four mass graves after the second raid as Israeli forces reduced Gaza’s largest hospital to a burnt-out husk. Many of the bodies found in the graves included patients. The Israeli army’s current attack on Jabalia’s refugee camps is the third assault since the war began and perhaps its most horrific.
As Hamas frustrates its plans, more drastic solutions are being proposed, including plans proposed by a group of retired Israeli military generals known as the Forum of Reserve Commanders and Fighters. “Those who leave will receive food and water,” said one of the generals, Giora Eiland. “In a week the entire territory of the northern Gaza Strip will become military territory. This is military territory as far as we are concerned, no supplies will enter it.”
The Israeli army is now attempting to starve and force out civilians, pushing them south to refugee camps in Al-Mawasi and Deir Al-Balah where the humanitarian situation is already dire. The plan was ambivalent on whether those who left could ever return but based on the evidence no with Israeli soldiers often firing at refugees trying to get back home.
400,000 men, women and children are now trapped and facing a Phase 5 famine — the highest level measured by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, designated as “catastrophe” as the Israeli army imposes a man-made famine. Many are refusing to leave. “We left our home in despair, under bombs, missiles and artillery,” said Mahmoud, an MSF watchman. “It was very, very difficult. I would prefer to die than to be displaced to the south; my home is here, and I do not want to leave.”
According to eyewitnesses, Israeli soldiers attacking the starved refugee camp are shooting anyone who tries to get in or out of the camp despite the ‘evacuation orders’ given by the army on October 7. Bodies are littering the streets, dead or alive, with many unable to help the wounded with Quadcopter drones and snipers are firing at anything that moves as tanks and bulldozers level homes, roads and fields. A girl’s school turned shelter for displaced refugees was also bombed, one of hundreds of massacres committed by the Israeli airforce since the war began.
Aid workers have been targeted with impunity and reporters covering the slaughter have been targeted with the Israelis killing and wounding several journalists in the army’s efforts to conceal its atrocities under plans, according to Israeli army officials, to prevent Hamas from “rebuild[ing'] its operational capabilities” through “systematic strikes and the radical destruction of terrorist structures”.
According to The Guardian, the Israeli military has claimed it has killed dozens of militants in Jabalia but it has not provided any evidence. 400,000 men, women and children are now trapped and at the same time, the majority of civilians are refusing to leave either because they are unable (as many are being shot at or bombed by Israeli forces) or because they do not want to be uprooted.
The Israelis have a long history of uprooting civilians since 1948 by refusing to allow Palestinians to return to their homes. In the 1947-48 war, the root cause of the Palestinian refugee crisis and the cause of much of this horror today, hundreds of thousands of civilians were uprooted from their homes by the Haganah, the paramilitary that would eventually form to become the Israeli army. Two decades later during the 1967 War, tens of thousands of civilians, including the majority of Syrians from the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights, were expelled and never returned and were shut out by Israeli military governors who established ‘military zones’ to secure seized territory as they purged it of Palestinian guerrillas supported by Syria.
Little has changed except that the Israeli army, more radicalised than ever, and Netanyahu’s government are acting more brazenly than ever before with disastrous consequences for its reputation abroad. With Hamas fighting fiercely and Palestinian civilians refusing to leave, even during its third assault, the Israeli army has turned to mass starvation, depriving the population of water and ethnic cleansing in an attempt to “finish them”. Red-lines have been crossed long ago and international law has been shredded in the streets of Jabalia, a microcosm of war where the Israeli army is increasingly killing for the sake of killing.
Not dissimilar to the military bases built on the bones of Rohingya Muslim villages by Myanmar’s army after it launched a horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing against the minority group in 2017, the dystopian ‘military zones’ and ‘Hamas-free bubbles’ being prepared by the Israeli army will be permanent under the veil of fighting Hamas’ operatives with Palestinian refugees wedged, starved and bombed into ‘humanitarian enclaves’, de-facto ghettos. This plan for a so-called buffer zone was made clear days after the October 7 attack by Eli Cohen, Israel’s foreign minister. “We will have a margin. And they will not be able to get in,” Cohen said to reporters. “It will be a fire zone. No matter who you are, you will never be able to come close to the Israeli border. Not only will Hamas no longer be in Gaza, but the territory of Gaza will also decrease”.
According to an investigation by Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, the army is bedding in for a prolonged occupation, seizing control of 26 per cent of Gaza’s land, building bases and paving roads with many experts saying these military bases and zones, as with those created in the aftermath of the 1967 war, becoming a ‘springboard’ for the messianic Israeli settler movement - revelling in Gaza’s destruction - to recolonise Gaza.
Hundreds of thousands have already fled south or been displaced in the current war, and Netanyahu’s extremist government, Jabalia’s destruction, and the razing to the ground of Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia and Gaza City, factor into the Israeli prime minister’s elusive post-war plans a devastated Gaza. So long as the Israeli government’s dangerous fantasies of reshaping the Middle East continue unchecked, Palestinians and Israelis will continue to pay the price. At this moment, Jabalia is ground-zero for the Israeli zealots’ ethnic cleansing of Gaza.