Since the beginning of last October, the murderous Israeli government has been leading a process of mass ethnic cleansing and accelerated extermination in northern Gaza, particularly in Beit Lahia, Jabaliya and Beit Hanoun.
Netanyahu’s government has exploited the shock of the Hamas massacres in the Israeli western Negev to massively expel some one million residents from northern Gaza. Now the occupation forces have invaded the same area for the third time in an attempt to expel the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian residents who remained or returned there.
The goal: complete occupation of the region and mass ethnic cleansing for an unknown period of time. The tools: a medieval siege of masses of families, starvation and thirst for death, and an acceleration of daily massacres to a pace not seen since the beginning of the war. The area has been completely surrounded by the military, which prevents the entry of food, water, medicine and equipment. No one is allowed in, not even rescue teams.
The prohibition on civilian rescue teams entering the area also sentenced to death wounded people who survived bombings and remained alive for hours or days. Deadly attacks on hospitals, arrests and deaths of medical personnel, combined with the deprivation of essential supplies also condemn to death those who were previously rescued and evacuated to hospitals.
Knowing that there is no safe place in the Gaza Strip and a well-founded fear that if they cross military checkpoints towards the south, they will not be able to return (perhaps for several years or even beyond), many refuse to leave the area and struggle to survive at home.
In Jabalia and other areas, simply going out into the street is a death sentence. Some of those who tried to head south were shot dead, as a Doctors without Borders team testified. “Quadcopter drones fly low over the streets, firing at anything that moves”, 27 years old Jabalia resident Mohammed Shihab told ‘+972 Magazine’. “Snipers are stationed on rooftops, targeting anyone who tries to get out. At the same time, soldiers and tanks entered the camp, destroying houses and paving roads and fields.” Family members who left their home carrying a white flag were also shot dead by drones. Medical personnel or residents trying to rescue people shot by snipers were also shot. Others, including the elderly and disabled, were overwhelmed by dehydration, starvation and illness and died on foot or while waiting long at army checkpoints (a long list of sources and testimonies can be found in an investigation published by Idan Lando).
A complete blockage of food entry into the ‘cut off zone’ led to the closure of the last two bakeries still operating there. Residents are struggling to get some food to keep their families alive. S., a resident of Gaza City whose family lives in Jabalia and has some flour bought before the current invasion, explained that they want to bake bread but are afraid to start a fire outside the apartment: “My sister lit a fire inside the apartment because she was afraid that a plane would recognize the fire and shoot them,” she explained. “Her whole goal is to hide the fact that there is life inside the house, because then my family was afraid that the house would be bombed” (Haaretz, 4.11).
“No Return To The North”
The occupation forces forcibly expelled residents from displaced shelters and often burned the structures after the expulsion. “There is no return of anyone to the northern part. In the northern part there is no return and there will never be a return,” said Itzik Cohen, commander of the 162nd Division, which is participating in the invasion in northern Gaza. This declaration is also backed by the systematic bombing of residential neighborhoods and the creation of a new division between the northern Gaza district (Beit Lahia, Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun) and Gaza City, which, among other things, prevents residents from returning north. The senior officer explained: “We received very clear orders… My mission is to create territorial cleansing…”
The military ordered residents to move even further south from Gaza City beyond the Netzarim Road, which has become an 8-kilometer-wide enclave with permanent military structures, infrastructure, checkpoints, and detention pens, cutting Gaza off in the middle. But most residents, including those displaced from northern Gaza, still remained north of the enclave, understanding that crossing south, through military installations, was a one-way route.
On 4 November, the UN estimated that some 100,000 people were displaced from the North Gaza Governorate to the area of Gaza City and that between 75,000 and 95,000 other residents are still in the northern Gaza governorate: Jabalia, Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun. By contrast, military officials claimed in early November that they had almost completely completed the ethnic cleansing of the area and that only a few thousand remained in northern Gaza.
“It’s Just A Pilot Or Promo”
The mass expulsion and widespread extermination are strengthening the appetite of the settler right. Knesset members and government ministers, including from the Likud party, participated in a conference entitled “Preparing for Settlement in Gaza” near the Gaza fence, and far-right Kahanist elements even established an outpost called “Eli Gaza” between Kibbutz Nir-Am and Sderot, a few kilometers from the inferno.
Amit Segal, a right-wing settler journalist who is close to senior officials in the murderous government, celebrated the mass expulsion in October on Channel 12 and assessed: “What is happening in the northern Gaza Strip is different from anything we have seen to date… And I think it’s just a pilot or a promo.” Segal’s assessment joins reports by Gazan journalists on the ground and other indications that there is a real danger that the government will not settle for ethnic cleansing of the population of the northern Gaza district, but will expand it to the entire area north of the Netzarim enclave, including Gaza City itself.
Will Starvation and Extermination Bring Back The Hostages?
“Enlisted” reporters together with the generals in the tv studios, including the initiators of the genocidal “Generals’ Program” (expulsion-starvation-extermination), continue to spew the lie that ethnic cleansing and acceleration of extermination (or in their words, “military pressure”) are likely to cause the Hamas leadership to compromise and agree to a deal for the release of hostages. In practice, the genocidal operation in the northern Gaza Strip directly endangers the lives of the abductees who are still alive and contradicts any deal that would lead to their release.
Out of concern for the public relations of American imperialism, the Biden administration asked Israel in mid-October to slow the pace of starvation and extermination and allow the entrance of some food for a population that has been besieged and slaughtered with American weapons for more than a year. The Biden administration, which provides decisive support for the genocidal attack, “threatened” that if within 30 days (during which the Netanyahu gang may continue to kill and starve families at a record rate) Israel does not comply with the request, it will ostensibly limit the scope of arms shipments to the occupation forces. But even if the threat materializes, during the transition period before Trump takes office, that will not stop the war of annihilation. Salvation will not come from the White House.
No Horizon For The Occupation To ‘Stabilize’
Even if the murderous gang of Netanyahu & Co. succeeds in carrying out its catastrophic plan to ethnically cleanse large parts of the northern Gaza Strip and establish a permanent military occupation of the territory, the occupation will not be carried out smoothly. Rebuilding Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, which Netanyahu described in an interview with Channel 14 as “unrealistic,” could lead to long-term strategic entanglement for the Israeli occupation regime. But even if far-right ministers Ben-Gvir and Smotrich do not realize their dreams in the near term, permanent military control of large parts of Gaza will bring with it new complications as part of an ongoing and rolling crisis of Israeli capitalism in the face of stubborn resistance from the displaced and besieged Palestinian population.
Parts of the Israeli establishment, which of course supported the genocidal war from its early stages, now fear the consequences of ethnic cleansing and permanent occupation. A number of elements in the Israeli military and political establishment (such as former deputy head of the National Security Council Eran Etzion) express opposition to some of the current war crimes in northern Gaza, and some even call on soldiers to refuse to participate in them. They are also joined by voices from among the leaders of the fight against the 2023 judicial coup and the Elections Now and Deal Now protests.
Over 280 Israeli medical professionals have signed a letter to the Biden administration in recent weeks calling for an end to the war, protesting “bombing of civilians, including women and children, famine, epidemics, lack of medical services and medicines, and air force attacks on medical facilities”, and expressing support for the letter of American medical teams demanding a halt to arms shipments to Israel.
At the same time, after more than a year of bloody crisis, the security demagoguery is weakening, with a majority of 55% of the public believing that the reason the war in Gaza is not ending is for “political” rather than “security” considerations. In other words, most of the public does not believe at this juncture the Netanyahu government’s war propaganda regarding Gaza. This figure fits in with the evidence of increased fatigue and burnout in the ranks of the Israeli army and opens the horizon for the expansion of anti-war protests.
The outburst of mass anger at the beginning of September that led to the general strike in Israel came both in response to the deaths of the 6 abductees and in response to the war cabinet’s decision to commemorate the occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor – which contradicts any ceasefire deal and the release of hostages. Both the expansion of the Netzarim Corridor into a large permanent enclave and the process of ethnic cleansing and consolidation of the occupation in northern Gaza are steps that completely contradict progress toward a deal.
This time, however, the cabinet did not declare what plans it was implementing or what its intentions were. While the Israeli regime’s military measures generally maintain broad support among the Jewish-Israeli public, public opinion is now more polarized. This is one of the reasons why the war cabinet prefers to expand the Netzarim enclave under the radar and carry out the ethnic cleansing in Gaza without a public declaration of intent.
Socialists emphasize that the current course of ethnic cleansing, expulsion and extermination in northern Gaza actually continues the logic of the genocidal war from its early stages. The opposition to the mass expulsion in northern Gaza and the danger of reconstructing the settlements must be connected to the need to expand the struggle to demand a comprehensive end to the war, the removal of all military forces from Gaza, an all for all prisoners/hostages exchange deal, the lifting of the siege, and the initiation of the process of reconstruction of the destroyed communities, under democratic control of the residents at the expense of the capitalists in Israel and other countries that financed the war.