The killing fields of northern Gaza speak of a crime that was confessed to long ago. The Israeli state is creating “a lifeless desert” and an “unliveable wasteland”, says Médecins Sans Frontières, “effectively emptying out the whole north of the Strip of Palestinian life”. Even by the standards of Israel’s year-long genocidal assault, this autumn’s attacks on the north have been defined by shocking levels of depravity. Yet almost a year ago, this very outcome was detailed on the pages of a seemingly obscure British journal.
Giora Eiland is a retired Israeli general who – according to US diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks – described Gaza as “a huge concentration camp” in 2004. He is the former head of Israel’s national security council, and says he is now acting as an adviser to Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant.
Last October he sketched out his vision for Gaza’s future in Fathom, the quarterly journal of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, a prominent British pro-Israel lobby group. Backing the total siege Gallant imposed on what he called human animals, Eiland argued Israel must “prevent others from giving clear assistance to Gaza”, and that the Palestinian population must leave “either temporarily or permanently”. There was no subtlety here. “The people should be told that they have two choices,” he declared, “to stay and to starve, or to leave.” And if they did not consent to this mass ethnic cleansing, “they will starve not because of the Israeli bombs, but because there will be no water in Gaza”.
Around the same time, in his column in “centrist” Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, he emphasised the need to ban fuel from entering Gaza, warning it would mean Palestinians would present to the world “babies who died in incubators as a result of a power outage due to the lack of fuel”, but that this was a “necessary condition” in an “existential war, and we are facing a situation of either us or them”. Less than three weeks later, newborn babies did indeed begin to die as Israel cut off fuel from the now largely destroyed al-Shifa hospital. In November 2023, Eiland denounced talk of “the ‘poor’ women of Gaza”, on the grounds “they are all the mothers, sisters or wives of Hamas murderers”, and urged Israel to embrace the spread of epidemics because it “will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers”.
More recently, Eiland cooked up what is called the “generals’ plan”, in which Israel orders civilians to leave an entirely besieged northern Gaza and declares it a closed military zone, with those remaining deemed legitimate targets. Eiland has stuck stubbornly to his script, declaring: “It doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to kill every person. It will not be necessary. People will not be able to live there. The water will dry up.” Publicly, the Israeli authorities deny that the plan is being implemented – unsurprisingly, as it would mean confessing to grave war crimes – but one official told the Associated Press that parts of it were already being carried out, and three army reservists have told Haaretz they believe it is being used in northern Gaza.
Indeed, food and other essentials of life have been blocked by Israel from reaching the 400,000 Palestinians remaining north of the Wadi Gaza. As Liz Allcock from Medical Aid for Palestinians – who was in Gaza for months – tells me, Israel’s evacuation orders give “the impression people will have safe passage, and they absolutely do not have safe passage”. She points out that, according to recent analysis, only about 150 Palestinians have moved south in the past few weeks.
Indeed, one UN official in Gaza tells me that their convoys have been repeatedly shot at, as they passed the bodies of shot Palestinians by the roadside, who had no weapons on them. There are many who are old, disabled or ill, who would not survive such a journey in any case. Others are exhausted by multiple forced displacements, traumatised by Israel’s killing of so many loved ones. “They’re not living any kind of life, they’re surviving day to day, and some prefer to die at home instead of having to move again, since safety is not guaranteed anywhere,” the UN official says. “I speak to people there every day and they’re either terrified or have completely given up on life.”
Allcock vividly vouches for this story. Nowhere is safe in Gaza, and broken, emotional Palestinians decide better to be killed in the north “than go south to live in a tent, dig a hole to go to the toilet, and maybe be killed anyway”. In the besieged Jabalia camp, 18,000 Palestinians are deprived of water, food and access to healthcare. Then there are the “quadcopters”, Israel’s armed drones. Dr Nizam Mamode returned in September from volunteering at Nasser hospital for a month, and he estimates that around two thirds of the victims seen there were women and children. “That was persistent, day after day,” he says. The drones fired distinctive pellets, some of which entered the chest; others, the back, as their targets ran away.
Eighty-six per cent of Gaza is now covered by forced displacement orders and, as the UN secretary general notes: “Two million Palestinians are now crammed into a space the size of the Shanghai International Airport.” But here’s the key point: all of Gaza is being rendered uninhabitable, underlined by a new UN report that finds Israel “has implemented a concerted policy to destroy the health-care system of Gaza”. Israel’s relentless, deliberate targeting of healthcare facilities has been described by the UN as constituting “the crime against humanity of extermination”. At al-Aqsa hospital, patients burned alive in their beds, some still attached to IV drips, following an Israeli missile strike this week.
Normally, states that commit atrocities against civilians go to great lengths to cover them up. Israel’s genocidal onslaught is not such an example. Rarely has murderous intent been so shamelessly and unapologetically publicly stated on so many occasions. Every day, the ever-shrinking surviving band of Palestinian journalists document obscene atrocities, while Israeli soldiers post them on social media for public amusement. It may sometimes have troubled you: how were the great human obscenities of the past made possible, both by active complicity and silence, including by those who saw themselves as humane, reasonable, “moderate”, when the scale of the crime must have been obvious? Having lived through a crime that was confessed to loudly and shamelessly from day one, a crime more documented than almost any other – well, now you know.
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Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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