Twenty-five shekels for a T-shirt declaring “Gaza is part of the Land of Israel.” Ten for a phone case. Fifty shekels for a 48-piece jigsaw puzzle of a territory being cleaved apart. Also for sale: baby onesies branded “Yishai,” the name of a settler camp planned for the ruins of Beit Hanoun, a town in northern Gaza, in case you want to dress your child in the uniform of a movement cheering the murder of several thousand other children.
It was Sukkot, the Jewish festival, not far from kibbutz Be’eri, on the eastern side of the border fence. Israel’s powerful messianist cause had convened a conference called “Preparing to Settle Gaza”—the sequel to a jubilant convention held in Jerusalem last January. As kids played safely in the sand, a ring of bored soldiers slumped in white plastic chairs guarded the camp and several members of Israel’s legislature. Punctuating the speeches was the low periodic thud of artillery, a crackling ripple of demolition charges, and, if you listened closely, the italic whistle of bombs. A few miles away: the entrance to the Netzarim Corridor—the three-mile-wide zone bisecting the Strip, built by the Israeli army to enable its continued clearance of the land.
The settler movement’s plans to reconquer the Strip and build on the ruins of Palestinian lives align neatly with those of the state that is today clearing the desired real estate. What was a crude dream in early 2024 is now, as the year comes to an end, being made with bulldozers and blasting caps a cruder reality. South of Netzarim there is starvation, disease, occasional airstrikes, and above all a sense of suspension—stasis, waiting. North of Netzarim, the army is snapping tight its noose. Everything above Gaza City is a free-fire zone. The operation there is the blueprint for what will follow again in the south, in the center, and everywhere else until the land and its people are no more.
There is a word, better than the ubiquitous genocide, to distill the monstrous totality of what is underway in the north of Gaza, and the clarity of the mission: extermination. And this rampage might be the first example of a modern war where its butchers tell you what they’re doing while they’re doing it. “What is happening there?” asks Moshe Ya’alon, former chief of the Israel Defense Forces, referring to Gaza’s northernmost towns. The army is “essentially cleansing the area of Arabs.” Starting in early October, the enclave was sealed. No aid allowed in, only people allowed out. Not for the first time were Palestinians, some 200,000 of them, commanded to leave. Their exodus—to where? No place is safe—became a death march, as they were exposed above to the bomber pilots and operators of drones; Salah Al Din Road was and is a shooting gallery. Into November the air campaign thumped on. Hospitals were blasted repeatedly. Individual strikes killed 20, 30, 80 people at a time. On October 29, in the suburb of Beit Lahia, bombs flattened a five-story apartment block, burying under it 93 Palestinians. Perhaps as many as 75,000 people remain in this closing circle. Every last one of them, according to the Israeli army, is a fair target.
“It’s permissible and even recommended to starve an enemy to death,” according to Giora Eiland, ex-head of Israel’s National Security Council. “The only ones who will be left in that area will be terrorists who will surrender or die of starvation.” Eiland is one of the authors of the now-notorious “General’s Plan,” a ruthless strategy put forward in September by a group of retired military officers frustrated that Hamas fighters keep reappearing in places thought to be cleared. Its methods are simple: Isolate an area, amputate the aid, then squeeze. While Eiland might complain within earshot of Benjamin Netanyahu that his schemes have not been formally adopted, the plan’s spirit pervades the army. A better name for it might be the “Hunger Plan”; the “Annihilation Plan.” In Eiland’s judgment, it is only the beginning. “Israel’s government sees the ability to win in northern Gaza as a first stage that will lead to a permanent Israeli military government,” Eiland explained. “In the next stage maybe also to renewed settlement.”
Eiland likes to pose as a hardened paratrooper: a no-bullshit blusterer, ignorant of political chicanery, who is merely applying cold analytical logic to a military problem. But his problem—Israel’s problem—is not military alone. An occupying power is obliged to preserve the lives of the people under its control, to give them aid, to not dynamite their homes. But Eiland sees no distinction between citizen and combatant. He does not discriminate. “The people of Gaza are like the people of Nazi Germany,” the general has said. He means the people are complicit. He means they are guilty. He means they deserve to die. And doesn’t that attitude run through the entire upper rank of the Israeli government? “North Gaza is more beautiful than ever,” claims Amichai Eliyahu, the heritage minister. “Blowing up and flattening everything is beautiful.” To the troops, the ex–defense boss Yoav Gallant says, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” And the troops reply: “There are no uninvolved civilians.”
Netzarim is the puncture wound in Gaza’s side. It drives westward from the border with Israel, where those settlers had their exultant meeting, to the Mediterranean. Along this freshly paved road: checkpoints, army camps, supply dumps, surveillance posts, buffer zones, sewage piping, electricity wires, cell towers, kitchens, prefab synagogues. To make way for all this superb infrastructure, these foundations on which the settlers can later build, everything else—the homes, the shops, the bakeries, the masjids, the museums—must be removed. “There was not a single construction left that was taller than my waist anywhere except our bases and observation towers” one soldier told The Guardian. IDF squads have been so busy they keep running out of explosives. Similarly, back in the north, Israeli construction firms deeply connected to the nexus of land clearance and settlement building in the West Bank are being given contracts to carry out demolitions. “I think,” Avi Dichter says contentedly, “that we are going to stay in Gaza for a long time.” Avi Dichter is the minister for “food security.”
We all know the old cliché about the first casualty in war being truth. The powerful and their propagandists need not be smart creatures, only talented—in the same way a serial killer is talented. Talent in making black appear white, a grim picture rosy, a cruel policy necessary. War requires a skill for euphemism of the kind Netanyahu displayed when he said back in January that “Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population.” After Human Rights Watch, in a long mid-November report, starkly accused the Israeli government of causing the “mass and forced displacement of the majority of the civilian population … a widespread and systematic” policy that amounts to a “crime against humanity,” the Israeli foreign ministry’s spokesperson Oren Marmorstein replied, “Israel’s efforts are directed solely at dismantling Hamas’s terror capabilities.” Sometimes the fables are so blatant you do not know whether to laugh bitterly or shiver.
Yet for every hard question dodged and every accusation smoothed over, there is someone like Eiland or Dichter to state the obvious. And what is the obvious? What are they doing? Gaza is the zone where the supertechnological is used to inflict on an undeserving mass a primitive form of life. Bare life. This is the latest frontier of elegantly computerised mass killing: a new way to carry out an old sin. The prestige of their machines is at stake: AI and algorithms, night-piercing radar, mass surveillance, the avionics of an F-35 jet. Can the killing be done fast enough? Trillions of dollars spent to design, build, arm, and operate a fleet of devices so that for every mother killed in Gaza, six children die with her—in her apartment, in her tent, on their street. The gleam of military might deployed for the vaporizing of families waving white flags and bearing all their worldly goods on their backs.
Here, on the waterfront, we see—many of us for the first time at real scale—what total power freed from self-restraint, the limits of the law, and the outrage of the world is capable of doing. This is what any regime can do to anyone perceived to be mounting a challenge to its authority. Daily that power proves its will: to maim and dispossess and destroy without discrimination. The many thousands still trapped in the north of Gaza have taken the only decision left available to them: to choose where they die. Like Ahmed, from Beit Lahia. “There’s nowhere else to sleep or pitch a tent, or even to find a tent,” he told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “It’s a fact that people aren’t streaming out of the area, as happened at the beginning of the war, because from their standpoint, no place is safe anymore. It would be better to die near home and to take comfort in dying in the area where we’ve been living.” Defiance of death is not a choice on offer. But you can be defiant in death. This too is a kind of resistance, a symbol of humanity, the spit in the eye of those who treat them as unhuman.
