Netanyahu’s diabolical undeclared war objectives in Gaza

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that Israel’s war on Gaza will continue until achieving what he terms “total victory”. Instead of examining Netanyahu’s vague and open-ended objectives critically, much of the Western media and many governments frame the onslaught as “self-defence”, and some even normalise the genocide as a “humane” attempt to “free” Israeli captives.

At the same time, the same pundits have decontextualised the Palestinian right to self-defence by ignoring that the 7 October cross-border incursion was a direct response to over two decades of Israel’s “starvation diet” blockade imposed on Gaza. Thus, the West turns a blind eye, and continues to enable Israel’s genocide and theft of Palestinian-occupied land in the West Bank to benefit colonies for Jews only. Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets downplay or dismiss Israel’s treacherous war objectives, even to the detriment of Israeli captives and the immense civilian suffering in Gaza.

For over a year, Netanyahu has prioritised an agenda to reoccupy and to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza rather than engage in negotiations for a prisoner swap deal. The release of Israeli captives would undermine one of Netanyahu’s primary pretexts for pursuing his diabolical objectives.

This is only possible because Western leaders embrace Netanyahu’s racist perspective, and only focus on the well-being of Israeli captives, while ignoring more than 10,000 Palestinian hostages held in Israeli jails, and the welfare of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. US President Joe Biden has expressed his concern recently over Netanyahu potentially delaying action to secure the release of Israeli captives until 20 January, when he will hand over the White House to President-elect Donald Trump, while expressing no sympathy whatsoever for the decades-long suffering of Palestinians.

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With the conspicuous silence or impotence of world bodies, the Israeli captives are a convenient fig leaf behind which Netanyahu saw an opportunity to reoccupy Gaza. It is worth recalling that in 2005 he resigned from the Israeli government in protest against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to “disengage” and remove the Jewish colonial settlers from the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu launched a genocidal war

Immediately following 7 October 2023, Netanyahu launched a genocidal war, disregarding the Palestinian resistance groups’ proposal for a prisoner exchange. His decision to pursue war instead of negotiations was motivated by several factors: he wanted to deflect responsibility for the intelligence failure under his watch; to evade scrutiny of his role in facilitating external funding to Hamas; and to carry out a genocide and ethnic cleansing to reoccupy Gaza.

The strategy to ethnically cleanse Gaza was advocated openly by Israel’s racist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who three months after 7 October called for Palestinians to leave Gaza. The scion of an Ukrainian immigrant family repeated the century-old European Zionist myth about only Jews being able to make the desert bloom, a narrative that not only ignores historical and geographical realities — Palestine was the world’s top exporter of citrus fruit in 1936 — but also contradicts his own Old Testament that describes Canaan, the land of the Filastini people, as the “land of milk and honey” before the ancient Hebrews migrated from their original homes to Palestine.

Furthermore, on 1 January this year, Smotrich’s fellow racist in the cabinet, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, declared in a Knesset speech that Israel should never withdraw from any territory it occupies and explained that the establishment of new colonies solely for Jews in Gaza is “an important thing.” The following day, Ben Gvir doubled down, stating that displacing “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians from Gaza would help pave the way for the creation of the new Jew-only colonial settlements.

“We can and must conquer the Gaza Strip”

More recently, last Monday, Smotrich told the Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing the illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, “We can and must conquer the Gaza Strip.” He claimed there is “a unique opportunity” with Donald Trump’s election to halve Gaza’s population, a veiled euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Last Thursday, Ben Gvir echoed the calls to “reoccupy the Gaza Strip.” All of Israel’s Jewish settlements, of course, and the settlers who live in them, are illegal under international law, a fact reiterated by the International Court of Justice in July.

On the ground inside Gaza, the tools of occupation were more explicit in defining the meaning of Netanyahu’s mantra of “total victory”. Israel occupation soldiers posed before an orange banner that read, “Only [Jew-only] settlement [in Gaza] would be considered victory!” Notably, the use of orange harks back to the banners used by the illegal settler movement in 2005 to protest against Sharon’s decision to evacuate the Jewish settlements in Gaza.

Germany: Israel has no excuse for hampering aid deliveries to Gaza

To this end, and starting on 1 October, Israel initiated a new phase of targeted genocide by starvation, blocking humanitarian aid trucks from entering northern Gaza, particularly the towns of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun and Jabalia, as well as Jabalia refugee camp. Where aid trucks were allowed in, food aid was replaced by sand bags. Starvation has become so widespread in these areas, that women and children are forced to scavenge through mounds of rubbish for something to eat.

The head of the UN Human Rights Office for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Ajith Sunghay, said on Friday after visiting Gaza that the “UN had been unable to deliver any aid to northern Gaza” due to “repeated impediments or outright rejections of humanitarian convoys by the Israeli authorities.”

Regarding the genocide by terror, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk reported that residents of northern Gaza are subjected to “non-stop” bombing. Simultaneously, hundreds of thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate, likely to make way for new Jewish-only settlements.

As part of the forced depopulation of northern Gaza — the most fertile land in the strip— Israel is constructing a barrier to isolate the area from the rest of the enclave. Beginning in early October, it carried out extensive controlled explosions, demolishing multi-story buildings to clear a path for a 5.6-mile road cutting across the strip. This road divides Gaza City from the northern towns of Jabalia, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has characterised this widespread forced displacement as part of an official government policy amounting to “crimes against humanity”.

Israel, which was “once a democratic state” is “committing war crimes”

Former Defence Minister and IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon confirmed the HRW findings on Saturday, saying that Netanyahu and “far-right” elements are waging a war of “occupation, annexation and ethnic cleansing.” He added, “There is no Beit Lahia, there is no Beit Hanoun.” Israel, which was “once a democratic state” is “committing war crimes,” said Ya’alon.

The documented ethnic cleansing being watched in real time in Gaza, much like the 1948 Nakba, as well as the expansion of Jewish-only colonial settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, underscores the true undeclared objectives of Israel’s ostensible “total victory”. Netanyahu’s deliberate undermining of US-led negotiations for a prisoner swap deal exemplifies his quintessential diabolical persona: exploiting the predicament of his own Israeli captives to further his cynical undeclared agenda of slaughtering the “Amalek” and ethnically cleansing Gaza to pave the way for new colonies in Palestine for Jews only.

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