Israel-Hamas war: Gaza Strip residents have nowhere to go as Israel exacts revenge

“We need to break the enemy’s bones,” Israel’s Hayom newspaper demanded at the weekend. “We need to bring it to its knees until it begs us to stop, to strike at it mercilessly and to pummel it viciously.”

That echoes the sentiments echoing through Israel’s halls of power.

“The price the Gaza Strip will pay will be a very heavy one,” Defence Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed while visiting the devastated southern city of Ofakim.

It was one of the main targets of the surprise weekend Hamas assault. It’s a site full of symbolism.

The village – part of the UN’s Arab partition – was destroyed by Israeli forces in 1948. Its residents, along with tens of thousands from the surrounding Negev desert, were evicted and forced into refugee camps in the Gaza Strip to create a buffer zone between Israel and Egypt.

Ofakim was re-established in 1955 as an outpost for immigrant Jewish settlers. It’s now a city of 34,000. And it’s one of hundreds of Israeli settlements the International Court of Justice has judged to have been illegally built on UN-partitioned Arab territory.

That mass-enforced migration became known to Arabs as the “Nakba”, which means “Catastrophe”. Its consequences can still be seen in Palestinian refugee camps still scattered across the Middle East.

Now, fears of a second “Nakba” are rippling worldwide.

“Anything less than invasion will be a grave mistake,” former commander of Israel’s Gaza Division, Amir Avivi, declared. “We need to conquer Gaza, or at least most of it, and destroy Hamas. We cannot continue to do the things that we did before that are not working. Not doing that will be devastating for Israel’s ability to deter not only Hamas, but the whole region.”

Monstrous acts

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you,” philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned.

The body count from the weekend’s attacks on Israeli settlers, civilians and military outposts continues to rise. More than 1200 are confirmed dead, and another 2700 wounded.

The most brutal attack was carried out against the 3500 Supernova music festival attendees in the Negev desert near the Gaza-Israel border. The current death toll of 260 is expected to rise further. An unknown number have been taken as hostages, with Hamas threatening to use them as human shields against retaliatory Israeli strikes.

“We have previously warned the Israeli occupation against continuing their crimes and appealed to world leaders to work on putting an end to the Israeli crimes against our Palestinian people and detainees, their holy sites and homeland and to put pressure on the Israeli occupation to abide by international law and resolutions,” a Hamas statement reads.

“Neither did the Israeli occupation leaders heed our demands, nor did the world leaders act in this regard.”

Israel’s embattled Prime Minister Netanyahu is not deterred.

“I say to the residents of Gaza: Leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere,” he warned. “The IDF will immediately use all its strength to destroy Hamas’s capabilities. We will destroy them, and we will forcefully avenge this dark day that they have forced on the State of Israel and its citizens. As Bialik wrote: ‘Revenge for the blood of a little child has yet been devised by Satan’.”

Preparations for that “revenge” are well underway.

But Netanyahu has not specified where he wants Gaza’s two million residents to “leave” to.

Israel’s Defence Force is currently massing 300,000 troops after calling up its reservists. These are now assembling near Gaza and Lebanon.

On Tuesday, Israel’s Defence Minister Gallant declared a “total siege” of Gaza.

“There will be no electricity, food or fuel,” he said. “We are fighting human beasts and acting accordingly.”

What does ‘permanent solution’ look like?

Netanyahu has appealed to the memory of Jewish “Diaspora” – or “Exile”. It refers to the eviction of the ethno-religious group from the Holy Land by the Babylonians in 586BC. A second “Diaspora” was triggered by the occupying Roman army’s response to an uprising in 70AD.

“Once, the Jewish people were stateless”, Netanyahu declared on Tuesday. “Once, the Jewish people were defenceless. No longer.

“In fighting Hamas, Israel is not only fighting for its own people. It is fighting for every country that stands against barbarism.”

It’s a similar argument to that being used by Hamas.

“The Zionist colonial occupation occupied our Palestinian homeland and displaced our people, destroyed our towns and villages, committed hundreds of massacres against our people, killing children, women and elderly people and demolishing homes with their inhabitants inside in violation of all international norms, laws and human rights conventions,” the Hamas statement reads.

But the brutality of the weekend’s attacks has reset the equation once again.

“Even relatively liberal and peace-seeking Israelis are expressing a shift in perspective in the aftermath of Hamas’s latest attack,” argues Foreign Policy analyst Anchal Vohra.

“Its scale and brutality have shocked Israel and united the diverse and quarrelling political landscape, with many now seeking a permanent solution to Hamas. For many, this means removing the group entirely from its sanctuary in Gaza.”

Palestinians fleeing Gaza have few options. They can cross Israeli territory and go north, into Lebanon. Or they can go south, into the Sinai desert.

And Egypt fears a mass of refugees flooding into its territory.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi this week ordered his troops to close the Sinai Peninsula border crossing with Gaza Strip, calling the situation “highly dangerous”. He added he would not allow Israel to resolve its problems “at the expense of others”.

Second Nakba

“Talk of ‘another Nakba’ is on the rise in Israel,” says Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel program in Washington DC. “Most of Gaza’s residents today are in the territory because of the Nakba and continue to be denied repatriation to their ancestral homes in present-day Israel and the West Bank.”

Even before the war, members of Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government expressed a desire to “wipe out” Palestinian villages. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich later said his call – made as Israeli settlers stormed the Palestinian West Bank town of Huwara – was a “slip of the tongue”.

But Hamas’ indiscriminate attacks are again fuelling such rhetoric.

“Israeli politicians are calling to ethnically cleanse Palestinians again,” writes Munayyer. “An Israeli Knesset member who is part of Netanyahu’s Likud party tweeted this weekend: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48.”

Munayyer, however, says such a sentiment is not new.

He points to a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, which found nearly half of Jewish Israelis (75 per cent of Israeli citizens) wanted all Arabs expelled from Israel.

Meanwhile, a long-term military occupation of Gaza seems all but inevitable.

“Any ground incursion that seeks a permanent diminution of Hamas, however, requires not just going in but staying back and reoccupying the strip,” says Vohra. “Israel thus faces a dilemma. Without boots on the ground, it cannot stop Hamas, but being on the ground means not just spending vast sums of money to take responsibility for the Palestinians post-conflict but also inevitably losing a lot of lives on both sides.”

‘Mighty vengeance’

Netanyahu’s plans for ‘mighty vengeance’ are taking shape.

“The enemy will pay an unprecedented price,” he declares. “All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble.”

Reports suggest some 600 Palestinian civilians have already been killed in retaliatory strikes. Israel claims the deaths of more than 1000 Hamas fighters.

International law demands “proportionality” in response to acts of war.

But proportionality is a subjective term.

“The sympathy that Israel has garnered this week, despite often being seen as an aggressor in the conflict reluctant to make concessions and find peace, might soon deplete if unarmed residents of Gaza have nowhere to go and die in droves in Israeli bombings,” Vohra concludes.

But civilian deaths are inevitable, argues Brooking Institution senior fellow Benjamin Wittes.

“A large number of innocent Palestinian civilians will also die — even if Israel conducts every strike in full compliance with the most rigorous understanding of the law of armed conflict,” he writes. “The nature of conflict in Gaza makes it impossible to respond to Hamas’s atrocities without inflicting substantial civilian harm. Palestinian civilians will die. And it won’t be a small number of them either.”

On the edge of an abyss?

Wittes says Israel now needs to make a repeat surprise attack virtually impossible.

“This would be true of any Israeli government, but it’s particularly true of a government of the right and far-right who speak in the language of security,” Wittes states. “Having failed to prevent this massacre, Netanyahu cannot afford to leave Israel vulnerable. (He) has to do something big …”

But, Israel has been militarily attempting to suppress various militant Arab groups since 1948. It has invaded Egypt. It has invaded Lebanon. It has laid siege to Beirut. It has occupied Gaza. It continues to seed settlements throughout the Palestinian West Bank.

Few of these moves have produced lasting security results.

“Israel has pursued a strategy of “mowing the lawn,” a phrase it uses to describe the periodic bombing of Palestinians in the territory to keep armed groups at bay,” says Munayyer. “But each time Israel says it is going to degrade and destroy the capabilities of Gazan militants, fighters soon prove they have only expanded and increased their capabilities.”