'Death is everywhere': Fears grow that Israel plans to seize land in Gaza | Gaza

Israel has tightened its siege on the northern Gaza Strip after the United Nations and other aid groups warned that the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were in danger. This raises the question of whether the Netanyahu government's ultimate war goals include territorial expansion.

The IDF says it is hunting Hamas fighters, but suspicions are growing that Israel is implementing a plan it had officially distanced itself from, known as the “generals' plan.”

The plan, named after the retired senior officers who pushed it, aimed to depopulate northern Gaza by allowing Palestinians trapped there to evacuate and then treating those who remained as combatants and imposing a total siege became.

The government insisted the plan had not been adopted, but some IDF soldiers in Gaza, as well as Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, say it is being implemented daily, but with one big difference: Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip have not been adopted a realistic one Given a chance to evacuate. You are trapped.

“It's impossible for me to leave my house because I don't want to die out there. There are also many people in the south who have lost their lives outside of their homeland. Death is everywhere,” said Ramadan, a 19-year-old from Beit Lahiya, whose family was displaced seven times during the 13-month war. “There are a lot of shootings and bombings of all kinds. Meetings are being bombed, shelters are being bombed and schools are being bombed. The area is overcrowded, so even a small bomb kills and injures many people.”

“Even if there are people who want to go south, they can’t because there is no safe road,” Ramadan said.

Israeli ground forces have laid siege to three areas – Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun and the Jabalia refugee camp – in the northern Gaza Strip, where about 75,000 people are estimated to be staying. But the reality is that there is no escape for almost all of the 400,000 people trapped in the northern half of Gaza.

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN relief agency Unrwa, made an emergency appeal on October 22, calling for “an immediate ceasefire, even for just a few hours, to allow safe humanitarian passage for families who want to leave the area and reach safer places to enable.” “.

There was no response from Israeli authorities, whose official position is not to deal with Unrwa, by far the largest aid organization in Gaza. “When we sent out the SOS, nothing happened,” said Unrwa spokeswoman Juliette Touma. On Monday, the Knesset voted to ban Unrwa completely within the next 90 days.

Since the war began on October 7 last year, the amount of aid reaching northern Gaza has been severely restricted. Meanwhile, the amount of aid reaching the entire strip has reached a new low, and hardly anything is reaching the north.

The UN Coordinating Agency for Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, reported that as of Thursday “no bakeries or public kitchens were operating in northern Gaza and only two of 20 health services and two hospitals remained operational, albeit partially.”

“With neither electricity nor fuel allowed since October 1, only two of eight water wells in the Jabalia refugee camp are still functioning, both partially,” OCHA said.

In an emergency statement on Friday, the heads of OCHA and 14 other UN and independent aid agencies sounded the alarm that the region was on the brink of a precipice.

“The situation in the north of the Gaza Strip is apocalyptic,” the appeal says. “The entire Palestinian population in northern Gaza is in imminent danger of death from disease, starvation and violence.”

The remaining health facilities within the besieged zone, the Kamal Adwan, al-Awda and Indonesian hospitals, were attacked. The third wave of a polio vaccination campaign started on Saturday, but not for children trapped in the zone.

Last week, Kamal Adwan was ambushed by the IDF, her medics were arrested, and after the soldiers withdrew, the hospital was bombed, destroying aid recently delivered by the World Health Organization (WHO).

“Kamal Adwan Hospital has gone from being a hospital helping hundreds of patients to a shell of itself with dozens of health workers,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general.

The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is hardly better. Mohammad Salha, the acting director, said: “There are shortages of fuel, medicine, medical supplies and food. There is no healthy water in the north.”

Salha added: “There are no ambulances. People carry the injured from the field on donkeys and on their shoulders. Some die on the streets because no one can take care of them or because they are wearing them incorrectly.”

The beds in the inpatient, maternity and other wards are full of patients injured by bombing and there is only a single surgeon left. Al-Awda no longer has any O-positive, O-negative, B-positive or B-negative blood supplies, Salha said. “So when cases come in and they need those blood types, they’re going to die.”

“We make many appeals to the WHO and have a promise [of deliveries]but the Israelis refuse to allow a mission through to the hospital,” he said, adding: “We don’t know how to deal with this situation.”

The “generals' plan” was presented as a means of using siege warfare to pressure Hamas to release its Israeli hostages. I defend it in an article in Haaretz On Friday, the lead author, retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, argued that the siege was not a war crime if civilians were evacuated first and that the occupation was only temporary to put real pressure on Hamas.

“If Hamas had understood that failure to return hostages would mean the loss of 35% of the Strip’s territory, it would have compromised long ago,” Eiland wrote.

Other analysts argued that the plan made little military sense because Hamas could regroup anywhere and return later.

To those under fire in northern Gaza, this does not appear to be a counterinsurgency operation. “They kill all people without separating a civilian or a fighter,” said Ahlam al-Tlouli, a 33-year-old from Jabalia camp.

He said his father, stepmother and sister were killed by snipers and his brother had been missing since Ramadan. “We had the opportunity to go south, but we declined because we knew there were bombs everywhere and there was nowhere safe.”

The intensity of what is happening in the northern Gaza Strip has increased suspicions that there are broader goals behind it. Idan Landau, a linguistics professor and political commentator at Tel Aviv University, wrote in his blog Don't Die Stupid that “the ultimate goal of the plan is not military but political – the relocation of Gaza.”

This is what Ramadan looks like in Beit Lahiya. He said: “I'm afraid if we leave, they won't let us return. They will take our land and our homes and annex them to Israel or convert them into settlements.”

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres on Wednesday urged the international community to stand firm to prevent “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, but the U.S. and other Western allies of Israel have so far been reluctant to use the pressure of their arms shipments to influence policy .

On October 21, the radical movement Nachala held a festival entitled “Preparing for the Settlement of Gaza” on the holiday of Sukkot. The event was attended by senior members of Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet and representatives of his Likud party. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on his way to the event that the Gaza Strip was “part of the Land of Israel,” adding that settlements were the only true form of security.

“All signs indicate that Israel has no plans to allow the displaced people to return,” Landau wrote in his blog, which was translated and republished by the +972 Magazine. “In this sense, the destruction in northern Gaza is unlike anything we have seen before.”