When you learn the Western press this morning, it’s possible you’ll come to consider that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s want to take navy management over Gaza is new. However dropping 2000lb bombs doesn’t rescue captives and wiping out entire neighbourhoods doesn’t come with out plans to construct one thing of their place.
On Friday, Israel’s safety cupboard permitted the occupation of Gaza Metropolis, formalising what was all the time the endgame of this genocide. The plan follows a deliberate sequence: First destroy, then starve, occupy, demand demilitarisation, and eventually perform full ethnic cleaning as soon as Palestinians haven’t any political energy and capability to withstand. That is how the dream of “Higher Israel” is achieved.
However why formalise this occupation now, after 22 months of systematic slaughter? As a result of the crime scene have to be sanitised earlier than the world sees what stays of Gaza.
On Sunday, the Israeli military assassinated Al Jazeera journalists Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa by dropping a missile on a media tent close to al-Shifa Hospital. Their names are actually added to the lengthy listing of greater than 230 Palestinian journalists and media staff that Israel has killed since October 2023.
With Israel banning all international media from freely accessing Gaza, Palestinian journalists have been solely answerable for overlaying and documenting Israeli struggle crimes. The assassination is a transparent message to them to cease, to remain silent.
In the meantime, international journalists who rode on airdrop flights to Gaza had been additionally warned. Aerial footage they launched supplied glimpses of Gaza’s corpse: A patchwork of shattered concrete, ruins and hollowed streets. It’s full desolation.
The footage shocked viewers the world over and so the Israeli authorities was fast to ban filming on these flights, warning that help drops could be halted if there have been any violations.
Israel is aware of it can not proceed to dam international media entry to Gaza endlessly. The genocide will come to an finish ultimately; help convoys and reduction staff will probably be allowed in and with them, international journalists with cameras.
So earlier than that day arrives, Israel is racing to erase the proof as a result of as soon as the world sees Gaza, it’ll now not be capable to faux that the struggle was about something apart from the mass killing of Palestinians and the erasure of their historical past.
The occupation of Gaza Metropolis is the assassin returning to the crime scene to cover the physique. The objective just isn’t solely to cowl up the crimes, however to persuade the world that the lifeless haven’t died and that what we see just isn’t what it’s.
The official dying toll in Gaza stands at 60,000, a quantity that by many knowledgeable accounts is an undercount. Based on estimates, a whole bunch of 1000’s of Palestinians have possible been murdered. As UN consultants declared on August 7, “Israel is exterminating the folks of Gaza by any and all means.” There are loads of crimes to cowl up.
We have now already seen the modus operandi of the Israeli military in attempting to destroy proof in Gaza. It has buried massacred civilians in mass graves with bulldozers; it has withheld our bodies of Palestinian torture victims; it has dug into the sand entire crime scenes of execution; it has planted weapons in hospitals that it has ransacked; it has lied about discovering tunnels.
All of this matches neatly with Israel’s lengthy historical past of burying proof of atrocities. Since 1948, Israeli authorities have systematically erased their ethnic cleaning of Palestinians by constructing on prime of the ruins of pillaged Palestinian villages and cities.
Israeli intelligence has additionally eliminated paperwork from archives that present proof of Zionist and Israeli forces committing struggle crimes in the course of the Nakba of 1948. A number of the paperwork which have disappeared give ugly particulars in regards to the brutality of Zionist fighters throughout massacres of Palestinians, like within the village of Dawaymeh, close to Hebron, the place a whole bunch of Palestinian males, ladies, and youngsters had been killed by artillery hearth or immediately executed. In 1955, the settlement of Amatzia was constructed on the ruins of the Palestinian village.
By occupying the northern a part of the Gaza Strip now, Israel will definitely resort to those identical strategies of erasure and falsification. It’s going to additionally be capable to management international media protection, simply because it has performed till now.
The Israeli military has solely allowed international journalists into Gaza embedded with its navy items below strict circumstances that rework reporters into members in hasbara. Embedded journalists should submit all supplies for navy overview earlier than publication, should function below fixed statement, and can’t converse freely with Palestinians.
Journalists thus develop into mouthpieces for the Israeli navy, parroting their justifications for wholesale destruction and propagating their lies about Palestinian civilians as “human shields” and Gaza hospitals and colleges as “terror hubs”.
The complete-scale occupation may assist facilitate additional massacres and ethnic cleaning. Those that refuse pressured displacement will probably be labelled “militants” to excuse their slaughter. Israel used this technique early into the genocide, dropping leaflets warning Palestinians in northern Gaza that they are going to be deemed “companions in a terrorist organisation” if they don’t adjust to “evacuation orders”.
Mass displacement is important to the cover-up as a result of it creates a brand new narrative that Palestinians are voluntarily migrating slightly than being ethnically cleansed. The short-term objective is to drive these keen to conform into focus camps within the south and detach them from their properties and land. Over time, it will develop into simpler to expel Palestinians elsewhere and deny them the best to return. It’s the identical manner Nakba refugees had been pressured to flee to Gaza and had been then denied their internationally recognised proper of return.
The response of the worldwide neighborhood to Israel’s plan has been simply extra condemnations. Germany went so far as halting navy exports that may very well be utilized in Gaza – one thing that ought to have been performed 22 months in the past, when Israel began indiscriminately bombing civilians.
These actions are pathetic. They don’t absolve these governments of their complicity in aiding and abetting the crime of genocide; they’re simply one other signal of their ethical cowardice.
The worldwide neighborhood should take decisive motion. It should undertake navy intervention, as mandated below worldwide regulation, to drive Israel to instantly finish the violence, to permit unrestricted humanitarian help into Gaza, and to present Palestinians the liberty they’re entitled to. Worldwide journalists have to be granted instant entry to gather no matter proof stays of Israel’s crimes earlier than it disappears below the duvet of “navy operations”.
It’s time the world begins believing Palestinians. For 22 months, Palestinians have mentioned that is genocide. They’ve mentioned it whereas caught below the rubble, whereas ravenous, whereas carrying their kids’s our bodies. They mentioned Israel was not defending itself however attempting to erase Palestinians. They mentioned occupation and ethnic cleaning are the objective. Israeli politicians themselves have mentioned it.
With out pressing worldwide motion, the phrases “by no means once more” will refer to not the prevention of genocide, however to the existence of Palestinian life in Gaza. The reality so many Palestinians have died to inform should not be buried with their our bodies.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
