Making Gaza Unlivable: Israel Intensifies Attacks as Netanyahu Vows to Seize All of Gaza

[Uncle Joe]

A damning new report reveals how Israel is systematically making Gaza unlivable. The independent news outlet +972 Magazine has spoken to Israeli soldiers who describe how they have been using bulldozers and explosives to intentionally flatten Gaza.

Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.

[AloeVera]

1. The destruction had a purpose: to lay the groundwork for the ethnic cleansing.

Which meant making Gaza unlivable.

What was hidden and denied (and contrary claims ridiculed, right here on DU!) is now shamelessly bragged about:

Just this week, Netanyahu made this link between the destruction of civilian buildings and forced displacement more explicit. “We are destroying more and more homes — they have nowhere to return to,” he reportedly said at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee. “The only expected result will be a desire for Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip.”

But the intentional and pre-meditated destruction has been happening since the early months of the war.

According to +972 and Local Call’s investigation, this was driven by a conscious, strategic decision to “flatten the area,” to ensure that “the return of people to these spaces is not something that will happen,” as Yotam, who served as a deputy company commander in an armored brigade in Gaza, said.

Non-operational” destruction, devoid of a direct military justification, began within the first months of the war: As early as January 2024, the Israeli investigative outlet The Hottest Place in Hell reported that the army had carried out the “systematic and complete destruction of all buildings near the fence within a kilometer into the Strip, without them being identified as terrorist infrastructure — neither by intelligence nor by soldiers on the ground,” with the goal of creating a “security buffer zone.”

The report quoted soldiers who said that in areas near the border fence such as Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia, and the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in the northern part of the Strip, as well as in Khirbet Khuza’a on the outskirts of Khan Younis, between 75 and 100 percent of the buildings had been destroyed by that time, almost indiscriminately. But what began in Gaza’s perpheries soon became a widely deployed method throughout the Strip, tied to Israel’s broader plan to make much of Gaza unlivable for Palestinians.

Much more at the link. It's an eye-opener.

Some of us have been saying this for well over a year, to be met with eye-rolls and ridicule. Or worse. Go ahead, read it.

https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-total-urban-destruction/

[love_katz]

2. Yup.

How well did their votes against "genocide Joe " and Killer Kamala work out?

We tried to warn them, but all they could do was heap scorn on us.

Funny, isn't it, how all the people protesting about Gaza only showed up at Democratic campaigns, but not a peep was heard from them during rallies for Fascist Fat Nixon. Hmm.

Now they're getting what they voted for: the fulfillment of that horrid video of what Orange Foolius intends to do, with his plans to turn Gaza into his next Rump branded hotels and golf resorts.

This doesn't mean that I don't feel deep sadness for the innocent people who are experiencing this atrocity, but we tried to warn the protesters here that they were being misled and used, but they refused to listen. Too bad that the FO portion of FAFO is falling on people who needed real support, not propaganda driven lies.

[AloeVera]

3. I'm sure your "told you so" is a great comfort to the starving kids.

Do you know what they endured - all the people of Gaza - for 18 months?

Eight babies - BABIES - froze to death in early January.

Pre-mature babies were left to die at one of the hospitals when the IDF ordered the medical staff to leave and then apparently "forgot" about them.

Do you know the sad story of Hind Rajab, a 5-year old girl?

So many horrible, unbelievable atrocities.

And now it's undeniable that all of it, the horrible destruction and killing, was done to lay the groundwork for ethnic cleansing.

So what should people have done, if they had a problem with this? Write sternly worded letters? Keep their mouths shut?

They appealed to the Democratic Party to stop it. It wasn't.

Do you know what happened? 19 million voters stayed at home. The main reason given: the GENOCIDE!

So now we have Trump. And yes, it's bad.

And it's also FAFO and we STILL don't see it....

Every time I see a post like this, with all the FAFOing, I don't know if I should laugh, cry or beat my head against the wall. Mostly the latter.

[love_katz]

4. And, what did the people who stayed home achieve?

Really? Dumpster Fire was the better alternative?

I think we both know the answer to that. All we have to look at, is what is happening now, and the fact that Rump is not doing a single thing to stop it.
My reply had nothing to do with schadenfreude, it had to do with an open eyed look at the results.

We tried to warn them, that the Tangerine Tyrant was lying, that he would be all in for assisting with the murderous removal of the people of Gaza, that he meant what he said about Gaza being prime ocean front real estate, with all the cruelty and corruption that was implied. But, nope. Too many people chose to believe a proven repeat liar, criminal, thief, traitor and adjudicated rapist.
The outcome of that choice is happening now and nothing that either of us can do will stop it.
The choice that had at least a better hope of stopping it was thrown away, and the power to affect the situation was handed to what is essentially a mob boss and puppet of Putin. The results were very sadly predictable. Elections have consequences. This is different than gravity, which operates without regard to whether or not we believe in it.
Trying to defy gravity has an outcome. Elections, like choices, have consequences, which could have been avoided by making a different choice.

[AloeVera]

5. I don't disagree with you.

In fact I agree with most of what you say. Trump is worse on Gaza and of course everything else. But that's not the whole story.

The thing is when people don't believe something can get ANY worse, they blame the people in charge and opt for the other guy who promises to make it better. Because they've lost faith in the people in charge. Compound that with the emotions engendered by loss of family, tribe or faith members, the sight of the carnage or the offense to an innate sense of justice and morality taking precedence over all else- people in these situations should not be expected to make rational choices. We should have know that and at least done some gaming out on the consequences. Because, as you say, choices have consequences too, as well as elections.

They were under emotional duress and also given an impossible choice and expected to make the right one. They failed and now are blamed because they haven't met our expectations. But it was our expectations that were wrong. We gave them nothing. Now we are outraged. We shouldn't be. We created this.

We should instead, imo, think about what we could have done differently. Take our lumps, so to speak.

Not a popular opinion here. Thanks for being civil and thoughtful. It gave me the opportunity to say what's been on my mind for awhile.

I really dislike FAFO though in most circumstances. It seems devoid of empathy, even a negation of it and screams schadenfreude to me when applied to Gaza. And it allows people to focus on the wrong thing, and not the immoral and criminal actions of Trump and Israel and the unbearable suffering. Even though stopping it seems hopeless now, we must persist. Imo.

[love_katz]

6. The problem was that there was no "we" here.

The voters who chose not to vote or worse yet, chose to vote for the other side contributed to making the entire mess many times worse. They refused to see that for a united "we" to exist, that attention had to be paid to the welfare of the whole. There's no way that letting Trump win or contributing to that win by actually voting for him was going to in any way improve the situation for Gaza.
As an ordinary citizen, who has worked low wage, low/no benefits jobs for my whole life, I have never had the power to stop unjust wars, so this refrain of "we caused this " is completely untrue, and I resent the insinuation that it is my personal fault.
I began voting over 52 years ago, when the war in Vietnam was still killing both our soldiers and innocent Vietnamese. I have NEVER voted for Republicans in all that time. I didn't sit out elections just because I didn't get my ideal candidate. The only time I ever voted third-party was the second time that Reagan got elected, and that was because the corporate owned McGreedia declared him the winner in a landslide before people on the West Coast even got off from work, let alone had time to go to the polls. Ultimately, the controversy on the networks doing that led to speculation that the early announcement of Reagan's win had contributed to the supposed landslide because many people figured that it wasn't worth bothering going to the polls. This lead to organizing efforts on the West Coast to prevent that from happening again, which eventually manifested in the movement to vote by mail.
The bottom line is, when faced with a choice between the lesser of two evils, choose less evil. Because some people thought they didn't have any responsibility to the rest of the citizens, they ended up creating a situation where there's a serious chance that "we" won't ever get to make any choices to improve things for anyone because the choice was made to give control to extremely evil and greedy people who have been itching to destroy our democracy and replace it with a Christofacist dictatorship, and have made attempts to do exactly that, going back to the 1930's and FDR.
"We" have been put into a nearly impossible position when it comes to stopping the forces of authoritarian rule from taking over completely. It didn't have to be this way. One thing that won't help, is telling the people who did everything possible to prevent this, that "we" are responsible for this. Nope. The people who own the responsibility are the people who chose not to vote or threw in with the enemy instead of putting their collective shoulders to the civic wheel.
Taking responsibility for being on the receiving end of abuse is not empowerment. It absolves the abuser for their mistreatment. Holding abusers and rapists responsible for their assaults is empowering. The sad truth here is that the people who refused to vote or voted for Rump sided with the abuser and handed them either long term or permanent control over our country.
I don't have a college degree, but I can see Dump for the lying fraud and con man that he is. Why couldn't these folks at least make the effort to find out what was really going on? How did their protest "fix" anything?