Forced evacuation inside Gaza

Seymour Hersh

Israel, fortified by bombs and funding from the Biden administration, is escalating the forced evacuation of hundreds of thousands from the north of Gaza to the south, amid fierce bombing and the deprivation of food and water for those who stay behind. This is continuing amid marches and other demonstrations sponsored by the religious right in Israel whose leadership also is calling for north Gaza to be turned over to Israeli settlers. What was a worrisome rumor in Gaza more and more seems like a reality.

Control over all of Gaza and the West Bank is the core demand of the religious right in Israel that now dominates the government. I was told this week by a well-informed Washington official that the Israeli leadership will formally annex the West Bank in the very near future—perhaps in two weeks—in the hope that the decisive step will end, once and for all, any talk of a two-state solution and will convince some in the skeptical Arab world to reconsider financing the planned reconstruction of Gaza. Arab communities in the West Bank have been under increasingly violent pressure from Israeli police and armed settler attacks have become a sad staple of life.

Meanwhile, life for the two million Palestinians in Gaza grows dimmer by the day as food and fresh water are harder to find and more costly as United Nations relief truck convoys have increasingly become targets of attacks in areas presumably under the control of the Israeli Defense Force. The cargo ends up in the hands of criminal gangs that are rarely challenged by the IDF or local Palestinian police, who only act when confronted by public pressure.

I spoke recently with someone who has a sophisticated on the ground knowledge of life in Gaza today, both the north and south. This is a current report that goes beyond what even the best foreign correspondent would be able to access. Getting in and out of Gaza is extremely difficult for journalists, academics and other outsiders these days, involving coordination with the Qatari or the Emirates governments. The vast majority of Gazans are unable to get out.

Below is the report, which I have condensed and edited. It’s not pleasant reading.

“The conditions in the north of Gaza are holocaust conditions. We don’t use the word because it has a special place in the Western imagination and heart, but this is a holocaust in terms of collective punishment and dehumanization and the technical tools. But is it a holocaust eighty years later being done remotely and on people’s bodies. . . . A missile is dropped in a densely populated civilian area, tents mostly, and then you have drones coming in afterward to pick off people one by one. We didn’t have drones during World War II, but we do now, and the logic is pretty much the same.

“What we’re seeing happening in north Gaza is what I told you months ago the Israelis were going to do, and this what they did. They will annex the north and they will annex the West Bank. Soon you will see all in the press turn to the West Bank. The Israeli settlers have been more armed since October 7. The government and the Supreme Court in Israel support the settlers, and there are right-wing organizers and community representatives who themselves live in settlements and they are ready.

“They feel there is no leadership in the United States at this moment to stop them. And that is really how the Middle East feels, period. This will be the new phase, and suddenly the world’s attention will go away from Gaza and Lebanon. And everybody will be talking about the annexation of the West Bank in a month or two.

“The Israelis have built roads and bypass roads and corridors in the north of Gaza, and they are now starting to nicely connect all with each other as you can see if you look at satellite images. The Israelis always said they were going to do this. . . . And those Palestinians living in north Gaza will either be exterminated en masse, as they are now, or they will be pushed south where they are humiliated and stripped and tortured and have to endure unbearable conditions. Anyone I speak to who recently came from the north to the south describes the horrid condition of having their children taken away from them. . . . Children are being lined up on one side, and the Gazans are told to pick up a random child and go with that child to the south even if it’s not their child . . . and not knowing if your child made it. These kinds of horrific tearing of the social fabric are happening.

“Meanwhile in the south, where there once was food but no cleaning materials, there is now no food. The Israelis are likely preparing to gather everybody into specific pockets in the south. So it is not only about annexing the north but it’s also about concentrating the population in specific pockets in the south. This is what they will do.

“And I’m not being a pessimist. This is what they will absolutely do: they are budgeting for it and making plans for it now. If you see it, you see it, and if you do not, then you will be surprised in a few months when the Israelis declare it themselves.”

“If you are looking for hope, it is in the fact that people in Gaza haven’t become zombies and are not eating each other or ripping each other apart. That is not what’s happening, but the social fabric is being sundered. There are kids coming into hospitals from stab wounds from uncles and fathers because they ate too much. And there are cases of rape coming in. I mean there is a breaking of the social fabric after a year of hellish nightmares . . . after a year of all international order and systems collapsing and failing to treat Palestinians as humans. There is absolutely a breaking, but there is still hope that I see in that people are not ripping each other apart. There is still production of art. And people are still growing foods and crops in the camps.

“And this is what Israel is now targeting: the vigor of the refugees and the camps. These are the enemies of Israel. The Israelis thought by turning people into refugees they would break them. But they actually are empowering them. So this is why they are going after the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and targeting the right of return, targeting the refugees. And why the Israelis are constantly bombing, bombing, and smashing things . . . the tents and refugee camps that are built all over Gaza now, in addition to what already existed. Israel is going after the refugees and the camps because they see after eight decades of doing what they did that these are places of memory and history and organizing and identity, and that is what they are trying to smash. Right? When you are trying to smash a population from existence that is what you go after.

“So the Israelis are not following the logic of war; they are following the logic of genocide. And when we understand that, we can also understand why their bombing is happening the way it is.”

I will report on the Israeli point of view about the future of Gaza in another column tomorrow.