Across Gaza, residential areas have been left ruined, previously busy shopping streets reduced to rubble, universities destroyed and farmlands churned up, with tent cities springing up on the southern border to house many thousands of people left homeless.
About 1.7 million people - more than 80% of Gaza’s population - are displaced, with nearly half crammed in the far southern end of the strip, according to the United Nations.
Further analysis, by BBC Verify, reveals the scale of destruction of farmland, identifying multiple areas of extensive damage.
That’s rather obviously been one of Israel’s primary goals from the start - to destroy as much infrastructure as possible, to create as much hardship as possible for the Palestinians.
And rather obviously, that’s in service to their longer term goal of taking full and direct control of Gaza. They want to render it uninhabitable, so that they can cast their planned occupation as a practical or even humanitarian necessity, rather than what it in fact is - brazen, and brazenly illegal, conquest.
The central point to keep in mind as far as all of that goes is that Netanyahu and his hard-right cronies have, at every turn, entirely rejected a two-state solution and any form of Palestinian autonomy. To just the degree necessary to maintain a PR facade, they claim that conquest is not their intent, but if it’s not going to be a two-state solution, conquest is literally the only alternative, so it is and can only be their actual goal, and their claims to the contrary are and can only be quite simply lies.
And not coincidentally, the wholesale destruction of Gazan infrastructure in which Israel has self-evidently engaged fits right in with that interpretation.
If there is nothing there to eat or places to live or anything at all then relocation of all Palestinians is necessary. That is how Israel will spin it to the world when they ask their neighbors and the world at large to take in the Palestinian refugees.
Don’t worry, Israel has a strong law of return. Once the infastructure is rebuilt; everyone with at least 1 Jewish grandparent will be allowed to return to Gaza.
Of course, calling for a right of return for the people who were literally just forced out will be a complete non starter.
The survivors, after the ones that Israel has already killed and the many, MANY more the deaths of whom by malnutrition and disease they’re currently very deliberately engineering.
Add to this the building of the buffer zone, destroying the farmland and their intent to disband /defund UNRWA after the conflict ends.
Yes.
Broadly, the whole situation is only murky and complex if you grant some credence to Israel’s rhetoric. If you start with the presumption that Netanyahu and his hard-right cronies are lying and that conquest has been the goal all along (and not just from the beginning of the current hostilities but for years now), then everything falls neatly into place and it all makes perfect sense.
That’s certainly not a coincidence.