Tel Aviv’s plethora of horrific war-crime strategies – from the Hannibal Directive to the Dahiyeh Doctrine – were nothing compared to the existential peril Palestinians face under Israel’s new Generals’ Plan: a systematic blueprint for ethnic cleansing and Jewish re-settlement of the strip.
The holocaust engulfing Palestinians in Gaza has reached unimaginable levels of horror, epitomized by a harrowing video that swept across social media of 19-year-old Shaaban al-Dalou, burning to death while still connected to an IV drip. This was no isolated tragedy – it was emblematic of the escalating genocide.
On 13 October, an Israeli airstrike ignited the makeshift tents sheltering dozens of displaced Palestinian families in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah. Amidst the inferno, Dalou’s 17-year-old brother Mohammed described his agony: “I can’t describe the feeling. I saw my brother burning in front of me, and my mother was burning.”
Mohammed had managed to escape when he heard the strike, but his brother Shaban and their mother did not. His father saved his 10-year-old brother from the flames, only for the child to succumb to his burns days later, according to the New York Times.
No more services in North Gaza
The horrifying video was followed a week later by photos showing soldiers expelling Palestinians from half-destroyed residential blocks at gunpoint.
Israeli drone footage published by Israel’s public broadcaster Kan captured images of Palestinians rounded up and forced to walk south through Gaza’s post-apocalyptic landscape without any possessions.
Many Palestinians who refused to obey evacuation orders, often delivered by announcements made by hovering quadcopter drones, were massacred by Israeli artillery and airstrikes.
Rescue workers and civilians attempting to save others have been shot at by Israeli forces or simply rounded up and ‘disappeared.’ There have been reports describing numerous instances where Palestinians were targeted while trying to help injured individuals. This has left the people of Gaza without any medical or emergency services, forcing a complete halt on health and civil defense services.
Even hospitals were not spared. Critically injured patients and the doctors treating them faced the same impossible ultimatum – evacuate or die.
After returning home, western doctors who had volunteered in Gaza expressed their shock at how many children arrived at the hospitals, shot not only once but twice, directly in the heart and head.
“No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by ‘the world’s best snipers.’ And they’re dead-center shots,” surgeon Mark Perlmutter told CBS News.
Israeli snipers and drones opened fire deliberately not only on children but on those trying to rescue them.
Palestinian families fleeing were forced to pass through checkpoints where soldiers separated the men from women and children.
The soldiers then dressed the men in white jumpsuits, bound their hands, covered their eyes, and loaded them into beds of military trucks to be taken away by night to Israel’s notorious torture camps.
In detainee camps such as Sde Teiman over the past year, Israeli soldiers have starved, beaten, and anally raped Palestinian detainees. They shackled the limbs of detainees so tightly that prison doctors were regularly forced to amputate limbs.
When these practices came to light, due to leaked videos and testimony from prison guards and released detainees given to the Israeli and US media, Israeli society quickly rallied around the sadistic soldiers and announced that “everything is legitimate,” including forcing “a stick into a person’s rectum” when a captive is merely accused of being a Hamas member.
Fearing such a fate and knowing that the Israeli army planned to repeat the Nakba of 1948 and never allow them to go back to their homes and lands, many Palestinians in northern Gaza refused to flee.
Those who were forcibly expelled saw images of occupation forces lighting the remains of their apartment blocks ablaze and proudly posing for selfies and group photos posted as ‘trophies of war’ across social media platforms.
The General’s Plan
The indescribable horrors underway in Gaza are part of a carefully calculated Israeli strategy known as the “Generals’ Plan.”
This blueprint, which aims to “change the reality” on the ground and forcibly expel as many as possible of the 300,000 Palestinians remaining in north Gaza while starving or killing those who resist and remain, was presented by retired Major General Giora Eiland to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet in September. Eiland’s words were chillingly clear:
We have to tell the residents of north Gaza that they have one week to evacuate the territory, which then becomes a military zone, [a zone] in which every figure is a target and, most importantly, no supplies enter this territory.
After Netanyahu was briefed on details in a closed-door meeting with the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, he declared that the plan “makes a lot of sense.”
The effort to initiate the Generals’ Plan began when Israel’s military spokesman announced “evacuation” orders had been issued for Palestinians in cities and camps across the North Gaza governorate on 7, 10, and 12 October.
Israel then laid siege to northern Gaza, in particular the Jabalia refugee camp, in what Amnesty International described as a “terrifying escalation of the long list of horrors inflicted on people living in the area north of Wadi Gaza since October 2023.”
In addition to surrounding Jabalia with tanks and pummeling it with airstrikes, Israeli authorities quickly blocked the entry of all humanitarian aid, sending the message that Palestinians must either leave north Gaza or starve.
Empty threats from Washington
The use of starvation as a weapon of war proved embarrassing to Netanyahu’s backers in the White House, who enthusiastically support the genocide but also wish to avoid backlash from American voters that may cause them to lose power in the upcoming US presidential election.
On 13 October, the White House issued a letter publicly demanding Netanyahu increase aid to Gaza, otherwise Washington’s “continued offensive weapon shipments” to the Israeli army would be in jeopardy.
The letter, written by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, noted that the amount of aid delivered had “dropped by more than 50 percent” since the spring and that the amount delivered in “September was the lowest of any month during the past year.”
However, Blinken wrote in the letter that Netanyahu had a 30-day window to comply, deliberately ensuring the Israeli prime minister could ignore it without consequence.
As the Times of Israel observed, “The letter was sent just weeks before the 5 November US presidential election.” As a result, “its 13 November deadline would ostensibly mitigate some of the political fallout, given that US President Joe Biden will be a lame duck when deciding whether Israel has taken the necessary steps to ensure compliance” with the US demand.
In other words, no matter how many Palestinians are burned to death, torn to pieces, or starved, Blinken will continue to play his role in ensuring that Israel’s supply of bombs continues to flow unimpeded.
Israeli atrocities in north Gaza over the past weeks show the barbarity the Israeli leadership is capable of when all political and military restraints are lifted. As Reuters understatedly reported on 18 October:
With US elections approaching, Israel is rushing to inflict maximum damage on Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and seizing the moment to carve out de facto buffer zones in a bid to create an irreversible reality before a new president takes office in January.
The race is on for a Final Solution in Gaza
Israel is now taking full advantage of an opportunity first created on 7 October last year.
When Hamas launched Operation al-Aqsa Flood, the Israeli military used attack helicopters, drones, and tanks to not only kill the attacking Hamas and other Palestinian resistance fighters, but also to burn hundreds of its own Israeli citizens to death in settlements (kibbutzim) and at the Nova rave, under the Hannibal Directive.
By framing these horrific deaths as Hamas’ doing and claiming it had suffered its own 9/11, Israel created a “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip,” in the words of the Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy.
In a policy paper issued shortly after 7 October 2023, the institute wrote, “There is no doubt that in order for this plan to be enacted, many conditions need to exist in parallel. At the moment, these conditions exist, and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if at all.”
As the absolute carnage in Gaza unfolds, activists and politicians from Israel’s ruling Likud, Religious Zionism, and Jewish Power parties are waiting and watching for the mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to be complete.
Resettling Gaza
On the hills overlooking Gaza, Israeli settlers watch the falling bombs, eagerly awaiting the chance to re-enter the Strip and confiscate the land and property of the Palestinians being torn apart by US-made missiles and artillery.
At the same time, lawmakers from Israel’s ruling political parties held a conference to plan for Jewish re-settlement on the ruins of what they soon hope will be Gaza’s depopulated cities and refugee camps.
The settler movement’s leader, Daniella Weiss, told the crowd that Palestinians in Gaza would soon “disappear.”
We have political support, we have public support, and we have the experience … We plan to take what we have acquired in the years of settling Judea and Samaria and to do the same thing here in Gaza.
While Netanyahu continues to deny that the Generals’ Plan is being implemented, a journalist from his own propaganda outlet, Amit Segal of Channel 12, was not embarrassed to acknowledge the contrary.
We can keep denying that what’s happening [in north Gaza] is an implementation of the Generals’ Plan – emptying of the Strip, starving the terrorists, eliminating them, capturing them. In my opinion, that’s what’s happening here.
While celebrating the implementation of the Generals’ Plan, Israel’s political and media class are now awaiting the election of Donald Trump as US president to officially “change the borders of the Gaza Strip” for good.
This is not merely a regional conflict or war but a deliberate attempt at erasure and ethnic cleansing being carried out in real-time while the entire world, other than West Asia’s Axis of Resistance, watches on silently.
By William Van Wagenen
Published by The Cradle
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com
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