"Specific Intent of Genocide: Statements made by Israeli officials indicating their clear intent to exterminate Palestinians in the Gaza Strip" – Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
The following information was published by The Cradle today regarding Israel’s ongoing war on Palestine which the Palestinian resistance continues to battle.
The Israeli military announced the deaths of three soldiers who were killed by the Palestinian resistance in the northern Gaza Strip on 25 October, where Tel Aviv continues to impose a brutal siege and is waging an extermination campaign.
Among them was a captain in the 196th Armored Battalion, according to a statement.
The three were killed when resistance fighters detonated an explosive device against their tank in the Gaza Strip’s northern city of Jabalia, which has been one of the major focuses of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in the north of the strip, dubbed the Generals' Plan.
Despite the siege, starvation, and constant bombardment, the Palestinian resistance has continued to fight.
Hamas’ armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, said on 25 October it “targeted a Zionist military vehicle with a Shuath explosive” in Jabalia refugee camp. Earlier, it said it hit two troop carriers with an Al-Yassin 105 RPG and a D9 military bulldozer with an explosive device.
The Qassam Brigades also announced a sniping operation targeting an Israeli soldier with a Ghoul rifle in the Jabalia camp.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement’s Quds Brigades carried out several operations against Israeli forces in northern Gaza as well.
“Our fighters … targeted a Zionist military vehicle by detonating a bomb, planted in advance, in the vicinity of the Indonesian Hospital, northeast of Jabalia,” the Quds Brigades said on Friday afternoon.
The Quds Brigades also targeted a D9 army bulldozer and sniped a soldier near Jabalia camp.
In just three weeks, hundreds have been killed and hundreds of others displaced as part of Israel’s so-called Generals' Plan, which aims to exterminate or expel the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who remain in north Gaza and transform the area into an isolated military zone. Many have refused to leave the north, out of fear that the military will not let them return if they cross the Netzarim Corridor to go south.
Hamas said on Thursday that it has launched an “intensive” political and diplomatic campaign in order to thwart the Generals' Plan.
What is the General’s Plan? Vanessa Beeley shared the following on her Telegram channel.
Analysts warn that Israel is trying to empty Gaza of its indigenous Palestinian population, with the Israeli military’s weeks-long siege on the north of the enclave the first step in the so-called “General’s Plan” that many consider a roadmap for ethnic cleansing.
In northern Gaza, Israeli forces have continued their weeks-long siege, bombing homes and forcibly displacing residents while preventing the entry of food, medical supplies and basic necessities.
I was surprised to see that NBC News actually posted the video, Inside an Israeli ‘General’s Plan’ to force evacuation from North Gaza on October 22nd with the following description.
Giora Eiland, a retired major general and former head of the Israeli National Security Council proposed a radical strategy that would force the evacuation of all residents from North Gaza, or leave them labeled as a combatant. NBC News’ Hala Gorani spoke to Eiland who detailed the "General’s Plan” and explained why he thinks it would work.
The introduction to the video is as follows:
We are taking you back to the Middle East where there are new explosive Israeli strikes in Beirut.
The fighting is also raging inside Gaza as you know, with a human rights group saying that inside Israel there are alarming signs that the Israeli military is beginning to implement the General’s Plan which is a dramatic strategy to force anyone left in the north to evacuate, to surrender or starve.
Mondoweiss published a more detailed look at how the “General’s Plan” has evolved in the following article written by Qassam Muaddi, which I am reposting.
The ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza as part of the so-called "Generals' Plan" isn't new, but the only thing standing in its way is the will of 200,000 Palestinians to stay in the north and refuse displacement.
Displaced Palestinians in Gaza City struggle with power outages due to Israeli attacks that destroyed the infrastructure in the city, October 13, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APS Images)
It has been 11 days since Israel started its latest offensive against the northern part of the Gaza Strip, which includes a complete siege of the towns of Jabalia, Beit Lahia, and Beit Hanoun just north of Gaza City. These were the first areas that the Israeli forces first entered at the beginning of the ground invasion almost a year ago, and they are also the first areas where the Israeli army declared “full operational control” after it had claimed to have destroyed all the fighting units of the Palestinian resistance factions.
The ongoing Israeli assault includes a ground invasion of the town of Jabalia and its refugee camp for the third time in a year. For 11 days, Israeli forces have imposed a siege on Jabalia and pounded it with intensive artillery shelling and airstrikes, destroying its remaining standing residential blocks and cutting the population off from Gaza City directly to the south. Israeli forces have also clashed with Palestinian fighters from different resistance factions. Last week, the armed wing of Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, released video footage showing an ambush in which its fighters targeted a group of Israeli jeeps and armored vehicles with IEDs and anti-armor projectiles, showcasing their organization, planning, and fighting capacities a year after Israel declared that it has destroyed all resistance in the city.
According to the Palestinian Civil Defense, at least 350 Palestinians have been killed in northern Gaza since the beginning of the ongoing offensive. But beyond the direct victims of bombings and shelling, the Israeli offensive on the north is strangling an estimated 200,000 Palestinians who remain in their homes in the area. Testimonies from survivors in Jabalia told Mondoweiss that they are surviving on canned food and whatever remains of vegetables or meat that entered through humanitarian aid before the start of the siege. What little food remains, locals say, is now being sold for ten times its normal price.
Israel’s current offensive on northern Gaza is being reported in the media as the apparent implementation of what has come to be known as “the Generals’ Plan.” The plan is based on a vision laid out in two separate articles by retired Israeli general Giora Eiland in the early months of the war. Eiland’s vision is that Israel should impose unlivable conditions on the inhabitants of northern Gaza by starving them out and forcing them to leave the south. Whoever remains, Eiland said, would be considered a Hamas member or sympathizer, and thus a legitimate target. The idea is to drain northern Gaza of its population and thus isolate Hamas from its social base, forcing it to capitulate or die.
While Israel has not saved a single inch of the Gaza Strip from attack over the past year, its focus on the north of Gaza, and Jabalia in particular, is twofold. Northern Gaza, particularly Gaza City, is the most populous area of the Gaza Strip, containing more than 50% of the Strip’s population. Jabalia has traditionally been a stronghold of support for Hamas, and has proven to be a place where the resistance has been able to recoup despite massive hits since last October. By tightening the noose around northern Gaza and squeezing out what little life is left, Israel will be able to further its goal of ethnic cleansing and annexation.
Last September, several Israeli generals endorsed Eiland’s vision and proposed it to the government. Netanyahu then told Israeli lawmakers that he was considering the “Generals’ Plan,” which was recently reported on by AP. Two weeks later, the siege on the north and the ground invasion of Jabalia began.
Despite the media attention that the plan has received as an Israeli strategic innovation in the war, there is nothing new about it. In essence, it is an enhanced version of the same Israeli anti-insurgency strategy that it has practiced since it first started fighting guerilla resistance groups shortly after its founding. This strategy was formalized in the 2006 Second Lebanon War under the “Dahiya Doctrine,” named after the mass destruction Israel caused in Beirut’s southern suburb and formulated by the Israeli army’s former Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkott. The Dahiya Doctrine is essentially a strategy of mass collective punishment, designed to cause “disproportionate” damage to civilian infrastructure under the assumption that either the population will turn on the resistance or the resistance will give up.
The hidden agenda: resettlement
However, Giora Eiland’s vision has another component not encompassed in the Dahiya Doctrine: the forcible transfer of the population through constant bombardment and starvation, forcing them to leave or die.
This isn’t the first time Israel has tried to carry out this vision throughout the Gaza genocide. Since October of last year, Israel forced around a million Gazans to leave northern Gaza and Gaza City to flee south of Wadi Gaza, the river that separates Gaza City from central and southern Gaza. Israel also created a military zone around Wadi Gaza called the Netzarim corridor, making it impossible for Palestinians to return to their homes in the north. Israel has insisted on preventing their return and has been one of the main sticking points in ceasefire talks. Israel maintains this position, ironically as it wages a second war on Lebanon with the stated objective of returning Israelis to the north, which has largely been evacuated since the start of the war due to the “support front” launched by Hezbollah on October 8, 2023.
The unspoken component of the Generals’ Plan in northern Gaza, however, relates to Israel’s desire to resettle Gaza — in other words, to replace the Palestinian population with an Israeli settler population, which would mean the eventual annexation of northern Gaza to Israel proper.
In January, a group of Israeli settler organizations celebrated a conference in Jerusalem attended by thousands of settlers to voice their demands to be allowed to move to Gaza. In the conference, Daniela Weiss, a leading figure of the hardline settler movement, said in a speech that “neither Hamas nor the PLO nor the UN nor UNRWA, but only Jews can rule Gaza.” In an interview with Israeli media, Weiss called for erasing Gaza and letting Israelis move there “so that they can see the sea.” The conference was attended by Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s key allies, who endorsed Weiss and the demands of the settlers.
The essence of the Israeli experiment
Even this implicit aspect of the Generals’ plan is not particularly novel. The depopulation of Palestinian land with the object of replacing the native population with settlers has been the essence of the Zionist project since its inception. What Israeli is trying to do in Jabalia and northern Gaza is a continuation of what the Zionist movement did in 1948 and has continued to do more gradually ever since.
The Generals’ Plan is a condensation of century-long colonial policy. Haifa, Yafa, Askalan, Tyberias, and West Jerusalem all used to be northern Gaza. Today, the southern Hebron hills and the Jordan Valley, where Palestinians are not allowed to build or graze and are attacked by Israeli settlers, are a less intense version of northern Gaza. The Bedouin villages in the Naqab, which are unrecognized by the state of Israel and live under the constant threat of demolition, are yet another version of northern Gaza.
The inaction of world governments, especially the U.S., to stop the realization of the Generals’ Plan in Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia suggests that these governments endorse the plan and its larger strategy of genocidal ethnic cleansing.
The only thing standing in the way of the Generals’ Plan is the decision of more than 200,000 Palestinians to stay in the north and refuse displacement, despite the bombs, drone attacks, hunger, and brutal siege. The clash of these two wills is the essence of the war for Palestine since 1948.
The following infographic published by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor on October 21, 2024 certainly speaks volumes.
We absolutely cannot sit idly by and let Israel get away with the sadistic starvation and slaughter of innocent children, women and men of all ages, much of which is being live streamed and tic toked each and every day. In so doing a huge body of evidence of Israeli war crimes, aided and abetted by the U.S., UK and others, is being created which will be very helpful during their war crime trials.
"What were you doing during the genocide?"
There must be peace and reparations for Palestine. 🙏
I highly recommend watching Peter Osborne’s interview with filmmaker, Richard Sanders regarding his new film for Al Jazeera, Investigating war crimes in Gaza which was released October 3rd.
And the west continues to fund this...
Azra, thank you for sharing more of this genocidal madness.