Gaza Made Uninhabitable as Uprooted Population Becomes Refugees

destroyed 500. Only now, evidently, have they hit upon the idea of flooding the tunnels, with water pumped from the Mediterranean.

The order to evacuate the northern half of the Gaza strip for the protection of civilians sent hundreds of thousands of the 2.2 million population streaming south with only what they could carry. But the IDF is now bombarding the south. Civilians were told to leave Khan Younis, Gaza's second largest city, and nearly two-dozen surrounding neighborhoods because the military believes Yahya Sinwar, the Gaza chief of Hamas, is holed up there. In Deir al-Balah, just north of Khan Younis, an airstrike this week destroyed a house where dozens of displaced people were sheltering, killing at least 34 people, six of them children, confirmed by an Associated Press reporter who counted the bodies at the area hospital. "My children are still under the rubble", says one mother. Palestinian children are now writing their names on their hands so that their family members can identify their bodies if they are killed.

Earlier in in Deir al Balah. 68 members of the Joudeh family were killed as they slept in their beds. They had been huddling together
before the strike, including some who had fled northern Gaza, as Israel had ordered residents to do. Israeli forces struck a school in Khan Younis where hundreds were sheltering; nearby Nasser Hospital was overwhelmed, having to treat casualties on floors slick with blood and tangles of IV tubes.

The numbers grow daily. The death count of Palestinians has risen to 17,000 according to the Gaza Health Ministry, with 70% women and children, 7,000 of them children. A morgue director says,

"The children’s bodies come to us broken and in pieces…We cry every day. Every day, we cry while we’re working to prepare the children.”

The evacuation orders to leave Khan Younis — the U.N. estimates that 1.9 million have been forced from their homes — have pressed people into an ever-smaller pocket of Gaza, ultimately Rafah, a town of about 300,000 at the border with Egypt which cannot hope to absorb them. And now the IDF is bombing Rafah.

Firefights are preventing distribution of food, water, and medicine. Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) says hospitals are running critically low on fuel and medical supplies with some 200 wounded brought in every day.

Hundreds line up and wait hours to fill jugs with water at the only working water station in Rafah. Then more hours to get a little flour. How is this huge mass of people to be fed? Acute hunger is widespread. The U.N. World Food Program warned that the entire population of Gaza is at risk of starvation. There have been deaths of children from dehydration and undernourishment, says a doctor at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis. Where, other than in streets and back alleys, are people to urinate, defecate? They are having to sleep outdoors, “even as winter rains have pelted the coastal enclave in recent days,” the Associated Press reported. Conditions threaten the spread of communicable disease. Humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza are “in tatters,” the U.N.'s emergency aid chief Martin Griffiths said, saying Israel’s military assault in southern Gaza left “no place safe for civilians” and made it impossible to distribute aid. All point to the creation of a catastrophic humanitarian disaster.

Israel has chosen to pursue its goal of exterminating all of Hamas by the wholesale destruction of Gaza. Hamas has an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 adherents, is the estimate, but that wide range suggests no one really knows. Let's go with 40,000. That's less than 2% of Gaza's population. How does the military distinguish a Hamas fighter from a civilian other than the few shooting at them. They don't. They can't. So they can only assume that among the 17,000 so far killed by indiscriminate bombing only the very low yield of less-than-2% of them is likely to be Hamas. That's a policy that says only the total eradication of Gaza and its people can get rid of Hamas, and that clearly is the policy that Israel's military has been executing. It brings to mind the Albigensian abbot who in the early 1200s when asked how to identify Cathars while sparing Catholics said "Kill them all and let God sort them out".

The question is whether there will be any Gaza left. More than 46,000 housing units have been destroyed, says the U.N. The infrastructure essential to Gazan lives is being obliterated. What purpose if not to render Gaza uninhabitable, a 25-mile expanse of debris for Israel to annex?

There are those in Netanyahu's cabinet who would like to see Palestinians expelled from Gaza altogether. Netanyahu himself referred to the Amakelites, a people the Israelites were ordered by God in the Old Testament to be "put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."
Housing destroyed in Gaza's Jabaliya refugee camp.
The repeated evacuation orders rendering Gazans homeless and the destruction of the homes suggests that is in process. In a leaked document dated this October 13th, Israel's Ministry of Intelligence proposes that the Gaza Strip’s millions of Palestinian residents be transferred by force into refugee camps in the Sinai Peninsula for Egypt and the Arab world to deal with. Danny Ayalon, the former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, proposes a second Nakba (catastrophe), the Arabic name for the 1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from the land that created Israel as an independent country. "There is almost endless space in the Sinai Desert... we & the international community will prepare tent cities...", Ayalon wrote.

In the West Bank, settler violence has been pronounced. Over 200 Palestinians have been killed in recent months, a high percentage of them children. Settlers have been forcing Palestinians off their land, evacuating with their sheep.

"Day and night, the settlers come to us, shoot at us. The children are terrified. The kids can't sleep and neither can we. When the dogs howl, we know the settlers are at it again".

The settlers slash their water tanks with knives and smash their solar panels.

In an interview, one man said a gun was pointed at his head while he was told he and his family must be gone within 24 hours or he would be killed. Leaflets tucked under their windshield wipers tell Palestinians,

"A great catastrophe will descend upon your heads soon. We will destroy every enemy and expel you forcefully from our Holy Land that God has written for us. Wherever you are, carry your loads immediately and leave to where you came from. We are coming for you.”

Leila Molana-Allen, reporting from the West Bank, has seen

"Hundreds of people being forcibly displaced from their land by violence, in some places actually being killed. Seven hundred thousand settlers building on land where they're not supposed to build supported increasingly by the government and the Isareli army."

Israeli settlers have uprooted the olive trees that are livelihood for Palestinian farmers.

An Israeli peace activist said that,

"The police are not very interested, and to make things worse, the army has deputized large numbers of violent settlers, handed out guns to them".

The Biden administration wants assurance that none of the rifles being handed out are the thousands of American assault weapons sought by Israel, but that requires trusting Netanyahu.

The full-scale attack resumed just as The New York Times broke the startling story that the Israeli military had in hand from a full year ago a 40-page Hamas plan of attack virtually identical to what was conducted October 7th, even to the extent of fighters floating into Israel by paraglider.

The Israel military dismissed the plan, titled "Jeriho Wall", as "aspirational" and "too complex for Hamas to pull off". That comported with a deeply ingrained belief held by Israel's government that Hamas was being "managed" and that they lacked the ability to break out of their fenced-in enclave to the degree needed for an attack into Israel soil.

In defense of their intelligence failure, Israel's military would say that all armies — and Hamas is an army — develop plans they do not put to use, but they were stripped of excuses by the discovery that in July a veteran analyst with Israel's signal intelligence agency reported that Hamas had conducted a daylong training run-through that looked like the widely circulated 40-page plan. Rebuffed by a colonel in the Gaza division, the analyst retorted:

"I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary. The Hamas training exercise fully matched the content of Jericho Wall. It is a plan designed to start a war. It’s not just a raid on a village.”

Did the brush-off have anything to do with the analyst being a woman? Isreal's loss of 1,200 lives could have been blunted.

The reminder of 9/11 was inescapable: the CIA agent going to Crawford, Texas, with the presidential daily brief titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US" and being told by George W Bush, "OK, you've covered your ass", and being sent on his way.

Israelis are furious at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for allowing the Hamas assault to happen after advertising himself as "Mr. Security". But for some time to come, he isn't going anywhere. His cabinet remains in place and there is no hint of a reshuffling. There will be no election in the middle of what could be a long war. In his camp are Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, both extremist advocates of expanding settlements in the West Bank, which they view as belonging to Israel, albeit thousands of years ago, and which they refer to as the biblical Judea and Samaria. There is the Zionist dream of "the transfer", of driving the Palestinians across the river into Jordan, which could be called "from the sea to the river".

So Netanyahu is free to act out his policies and perhaps thinks that extreme measures will be rewarded by even liberal Israelis who might find it a relief if Bibi could just get rid of Palestinians altogether.

All the while, President Biden asks Congress for $14.3 billion for Israel, no attached strings apparent, which is viewed in the fading support of the progressive wing of his party as the U.S. paying for the slaughter of Gaza's civilian populace.

Further accounts and videos of the October 7th attack have shown the barbarity of the Hamas terrorists to be well beyond what one could imagine that a human would do to other humans. We know of rape, we know of the killing of children, but only when one learns in detail of the sickening depravity, the physical descriptions of their savagery, do we learn the unparalleled horror of that day.

What a mistake it therefore is for Israel not to have chosen a campaign of special ops, drones, tunnel flooding to root out Hamas. Instead, to have opted for wholesale bombing killing tens of thousands of civilians, ending the short lives of thousands of children, driving virtually the entire population out of their homes — this is turning the world against Israel, a world that will not write off a death toll approaching 20,000 as simple eye-for-an-eye revenge. We are seeing accusations of ethnic cleansing, of genocide.