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Opinion | The U.S. Should Think Twice About Israel’s Plans for Gaza [1]
['Rashid Khalidi']
Date: 2023-10-15
Israel has ordered more than a million people to leave northern Gaza, presumably to prepare for an imminent ground offensive. Its military strategists appear to be planning the depopulation and reoccupation of at least part of an area home to around 2.3 million people — nearly half of them children — and most of them descended from people driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. We must understand that these are human beings at grave risk, not just numbers.
Consider what some in the Israeli defense establishment have said.
“The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in,” a reservist major general, Giora Eiland, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli newspaper. “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” He added, “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”
The depopulation of Gaza would be manifestly inhumane and a violation of international law. President Biden and his advisers should ask themselves how it can be in the national interest of the United States to allow another mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. Such a cataclysm would be a second nakba, or catastrophe, as the displacement of 1948 is called. The United States would thereby be a partner with Israel in creating a future for the Palestinians that offers only periodic death, destruction and dispossession and permanent subjugation or expulsion.
Israeli forces have attacked Gaza six times from 2006 until the recent siege, killing well over 4,000 people. According to the Jerusalem-based human rights watchdog B’Tselem, that figure includes 405 in 2006, 1,391 in 2008 and 2009, 167 in 2012, 2,203 in 2014, 232 in 2021 and 33 in 2022. Each time, casualties for Palestinian civilians have outnumbered combatants.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/opinion/israel-united-states-gaza.html
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