Israel has tightened its siege of northern Gaza in the face of warnings from the UN and other aid agencies that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian lives at are risk, raising questions over whether the Netanyahu government’s ultimate war aims include territorial expansion.
The IDF says it is hunting Hamas militants but suspicions are growing that Israel is putting into practice a blueprint it had officially distanced itself from, known as the “generals’ plan”.
The plan, named after the retired senior officers promoting it, was intended to depopulate northern Gaza by giving the Palestinians trapped there an opportunity to evacuate and then treating those that stayed as combatants, laying total siege.
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 on a daily basis, but with a major difference: the Palestinians in northern Gaza were not given a realistic chance to evacuate. They are trapped.
“It is impossible for me to leave my house because I do not want to die out there. There are many people who lost their lives away from their homes, even in the south. Death is everywhere,” said Ramadan, a 19-year-old in Beit Lahiya whose family has been displaced seven times over the course of the 13-month war. “There is a lot of shooting and all kinds of bombing. Gatherings are being bombed, shelters are being bombed, and schools are being bombed. The area is overcrowded, so that even a small bomb kills and injures a lot of people.”
“Even if there are people who want to go south, they can’t because there is no safe road,” Ramadan said.
Israeli ground troops have laid siege to three areas – Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun and the Jabalia refugee camp – in the northern Gaza governorate, where there are estimated to be about 75,000 people. But the reality for almost all the 400,000 trapped across the northern half of Gaza is that there is no escape.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN relief agency Unrwa, made an emergency appeal on 22 October, calling for “an immediate truce, even for a few hours, to enable safe humanitarian passage for families who wish to leave the area and reach safer places”.
There was no response from the Israeli authorities, whose official position is not to deal with Unrwa, by far the biggest aid agency in Gaza. “Nothing happened when we sent that SOS out,” said Unrwa spokesperson Juliette Touma. On Monday, the Knesset voted to ban Unrwa altogether within the next 90 days.
The amount of aid reaching north Gaza has been heavily restricted since the start of the war on 7 October last year. Now the quantities of relief supplies entering the whole strip have hit a new low, and barely anything is reaching the north.
The UN humanitarian affairs coordination agency, OCHA, reported that, as of Thursday, “no bakeries or public kitchens in north Gaza are operational, and only two of 20 health service points and two hospitals remain operational, albeit partially”.
“With no electricity or fuel allowed since 1 October, only two of eight water wells in Jabalia refugee camp remain functional, both of them partially,” OCHA said.
In an emergency statement on Friday, the heads of OCHA and 14 other UN and independent aid agencies raised the alarm that the area was at the brink of an abyss.
“The situation unfolding in north Gaza is apocalyptic,” the appeal said. “The entire Palestinian population in north Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence.”
The residual health facilities inside the besieged zone, the Kamal Adwan, al-Awda and Indonesian hospitals, have been targeted. The third wave of a polio vaccination campaign got under way on Saturday, but not for children trapped in that zone.
In the past week, Kamal Adwan was raided by the IDF, its medics detained, and then, after the soldiers withdrew, the hospital was bombed, destroying supplies recently delivered by the World Health Organization (WHO).
“Kamal Adwan hospital has been reduced from a hospital helping hundreds of patients, with dozens of health workers, to a shell of itself,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general.
The situation is hardly any better at al-Awda hospital. Mohammad Salha, its acting director, said: “There is a shortage of fuel, of medication, medical supplies and food. There is no healthy water in the north.”
“There are no ambulances,” Salha said. “The people are bringing the injured from the field on donkeys and on their shoulders. Some are dying in the streets because no one can take care of them, or they are carrying them the wrong way.”
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The beds in the inpatient, maternity and other wards are all full of patients injured by bombing, and there is just a single surgeon left. Al-Awda has no O-positive, O-negative, B-positive or B-negative blood units left, Salha said, “so if any cases come in and need these blood groups, they will die”.
“We are making a lot of appeals to the WHO, and we 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 put pressure on Hamas to release its Israeli hostages. Defending it in an article in Haaretz on Friday, its principal author, the retired major general Giora Eiland, argued that siege was not a war crime if civilians were evacuated first, and that the occupation would be temporary, as a way of putting real pressure on Hamas.
“Had Hamas understood that not returning hostages means losing 35% of the strip’s territory, it would have compromised long ago,” Eiland wrote.
Other analysts argued that the plan made little military sense, as Hamas could reconstitute anywhere and return later.
For those under fire in northern Gaza, it does not seem like a counter-insurgency measure. “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 opportunities to head south but refused because we know that the bombing is everywhere and there is no safe place.”
The ferocity of what is happening in northern Gaza has added to suspicions that there are more wide-reaching objectives at play. Idan Landau, a Tel Aviv University linguistics professor and political commentator, wrote on his blog, Don’t Die Stupid, that “the ultimate goal of the plan is not military but political – resettling Gaza”.
That is how it looks to Ramadan in Beit Lahiya. He said: “I am afraid that if we go, they will not let us return. They will take our lands and homes and annex them to Israel or turn them into settlements.”
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, called on Wednesday for the international community to stand firm to prevent “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, but the US and other western allies of Israel have so far been reluctant to use the leverage of their arms supplies to influence policy.
On 21 October, the radical movement Nachala held a festival on the Sukkot holiday titled: “Preparing to Settle Gaza”. It was attended by senior members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet as well as representatives of his Likud party. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said on his way to the event that the Gaza strip is “part of the land of Israel”, adding that settlements were the only true form of security.
“All the signs indicate that Israel is not planning to let the displaced return,’ Landau wrote on his blog, translated and republished by the +972 magazine. “In this sense, the destruction in northern Gaza is unlike anything we have seen before.”