December
5, 2023
It
seems all restraints have been removed, but Israel's unrepentant backers in the
West continue to turn a blind eye as the Palestinian people face a genocidal
assault.
A Palestinian man carries a child injured
during Israeli bombardment in Rafah, on the southern Gaza Strip, on
December 2, 2023, as the bombing campaign by the Israeli military
described as "genocidal" continued.
It
should already have been evident from the scale of death and destruction
inflicted on Gaza over the past eight weeks that Israel was implementing a
policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide against Palestinians in the besieged
enclave.
Now
Israeli whistleblowers have provided details of how these crimes against
humanity are being carried out - and how they are being rationalised internally
within Israel’s military and political echelons.
An
extraordinary series of testimonies jointly published by the Israel-based
publications 972 and Local Call last week established that the huge death toll
of Palestinian civilians is, in fact, integral to Israel’s war aims, not an
unfortunate side effect.
The
known dead so far are estimated at almost 16,000, with a further 6,000 missing,
presumably crushed under rubble. Two-thirds of those killed by Israel are women
and children.
Two
years ago, during an earlier attack on Gaza, Israeli military officials
admitted for the first time that a computer was supplying them with potential
targets. The intention appears to have been to bypass the restraints imposed by
human assessments of likely casualties by outsourcing the killings to a
machine.
The
whistleblowers confirm that, given new, generous parameters of who and what can
be attacked, the artificial intelligence system, called “Gospel”, is generating
lists of targets so rapidly the military cannot keep up.
Israel’s
inputs are now so broad that they allow the bombing without warning of
high-rise apartment blocks, so long as it can be claimed that one person
residing there is believed to have a connection to Hamas.
As
Hamas not only has a military wing but runs the enclave’s government, the new
policy potentially widens the circle of targets to include civil servants,
police, health workers, educators, journalists and aid workers.
That
helps explain how, according to United Nations figures, some 100,000 homes in
Gaza have been leveled or made uninhabitable and 1.7 million Palestinians
displaced, or some three-quarters of the enclave’s population.
Basic
survival
The
revelations definitively give the lie to claims by Western politicians, such as
US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and opposition Labour
leader Keir Starmer, that Israel is simply defending itself and trying to avoid
civilian casualties.
In
a report last Friday, the Guardian corroborated Israel’s reliance on the Gospel
computing system. The paper quoted a former White House official familiar with
the Pentagon’s development of autonomous offensive systems as stating that
Israel’s no-holds-barred AI war on Gaza was an “important moment.”
The
official added: “Other states are going to be watching and learning.”
Perhaps
the most significant of the disclosures from current and former Israeli
officials who have spoken to 972 and Local Call is the fact that Israel is
aware its many thousands of air strikes on Gaza’s residential areas are having
a minimal impact on the armed wing of Hamas.
This
contrasts with public declarations that Israel is seeking to eradicate the
group.
Even
according to the Israeli military’s own claims, likely based on the new, much
broader definition of who counts as a Hamas target, Israel has killed between
1,000 and 3,000 “operatives” - meaning that, even by Israel’s assessment,
civilians comprise between 85 and 95 per cent of those dead from its bombing
campaigns.
This
is not accidental, according to the sources.
Israel
is continuing long-standing military policies towards Gaza—principally the
so-called Dahiya doctrine, sometimes known as “mowing the lawn”—but has changed
the focus to allow for far greater bloodshed among civilians.
The
doctrine, which has guided Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza over the last 15
years, is named after the destruction of an entire neighbourhood of Beirut in
Israel’s war on Lebanon in 2006.
The
doctrine has two key premises: that laying waste to an enemy area will force
the population to concentrate on basic survival rather than resistance; and in
the longer term it will encourage ordinary people to rise up against their
rulers.
Traditionally,
the Dahiya doctrine was chiefly about the destruction of infrastructure. At
least officially, given the strictures of international law, Israel claimed it
issued advance warnings. That was supposed to give civilians in the targeted
area time to evacuate.
According
to military officials, this notice period has largely ended, placing civilians
directly in Israel’s crosshairs.
‘Not
surgical’
A
source explained the effects of the new policy to 972: “The numbers increased
from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an
attack on a senior [Hamas] official in previous operations, to hundreds of
civilian deaths as collateral damage.”
A
former military intelligence official said the policy was designed to make most
of Gaza’s infrastructure legitimate targets: “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza;
there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you
want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do
so.”
According
to these sources, given that Hamas’ armed wing is underground in tunnels,
Israel has struggled to identify primary targets, such as weapons sites, armed
cells and headquarters.
Instead,
it has focused on what it calls “power targets”—or more accurately, symbolic
targets—such as high-rise buildings and residential towers in urban areas, as
well as public buildings such as universities, banks, government offices,
hospitals and mosques.
These
attacks, say the sources, are seen as a “means that allows damage to civil
society,” weakening the ability of the society to organise and function, and
families to subsist. According to 972, the former Israeli officials it spoke to
“understood, some explicitly and some implicitly, that damage to civilians is
the real purpose of these attacks.”
Referring
to the high death toll among civilians, another source stated: “Everything is
intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every
home.”
Five
different sources told 972 that Israel had compiled files on tens of thousands
of private homes and apartments in Gaza where low-level Hamas members live. The
homes, as well as everyone who lives in them, were viewed as a legitimate
target as soon as a Hamas-linked person entered the building.
One
noted: “Hamas members who don’t really matter for anything live in homes across
Gaza. So they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there.”
Another
source observed of this practice that its equivalent would be for Hamas to bomb
“all the private residences of our families when [Israeli soldiers] go back to
sleep at home on the weekend.”
An
official who had overseen previous attacks on Gaza said Israel would claim one
floor in a high-rise was serving as the office of a Hamas or Islamic Jihad
spokesman to justify leveling the building. “I understood that the floor is an
excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza.”
If
the truth were known about what Israel was doing, the source added, “this would
itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it.”
Another
stated that Israel’s aim was to inflict maximum damage rather than hit the part
of the building associated with Hamas. “It was also possible to hit that
specific target with more accurate weaponry. The bottom line is that they
knocked down a high-rise for the sake of knocking down a high-rise.”
Senior
Israeli officials have made this goal explicit over the past few weeks. Omer
Tishler, the head of the Israeli air force, told military reporters that entire
neighborhoods had been attacked “on a large scale and not in a surgical
manner.”
A
source said Israel’s long-term aim was “to give the citizens of Gaza the
feeling that Hamas is not in control of the situation.”
Holy
war
In
previous attacks on Gaza, Israel adopted a strategy that inflicted wanton
destruction on infrastructure and led to large numbers of Palestinians being
killed. But according to the sources quoted by 972 and Local Call, all
restraints have been removed, dramatically scaling up the fallout for
civilians.
Tishler,
the head of the air force, has confirmed that, in many cases before bombing a
building, Israel no longer provides a warning strike with a small shell - known
as “ roof knocking.” The practice, he said, was “relevant to rounds [of
fighting] and not to war.”
The
risk this poses to civilians has been highlighted by the disclosure that the
Israeli military is now using an artificial intelligence system, Habsora or
Gospel, to identify targets.The very name, with its biblical connotation,
confirms the dangerous influences of religious fundamentalism now at play in
the Israeli military, and the increasing assumption that Israel is engaged in a
holy war against the Palestinians.
Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, traditionally seen as a secular figure, has
adopted the language of the extremist settler right in calling Israel’s attack
on Gaza a war against “Amalek” — a biblical enemy whose men, women and children
the Israelites were commanded by God to exterminate.
Speaking
of the military’s new reliance on Gospel, Aviv Kochavi, the former head of the
Israeli military, told the Israeli Ynet website earlier this year: “In the
past, we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces
100 targets a single day, with 50 per cent of them being attacked.”
The
goal, he observed, was to address a “problem” in earlier bombing campaigns
against Gaza that the Israeli military quickly ran out of Hamas and Islamic
Jihad targets its human staff could identify.
A
former intelligence officer told 972 that the Targets Administrative Division
that runs Gospel had been turned into a “mass assassination factory”. Tens of
thousands of people had been listed as “junior Hamas operatives” and were
therefore treated as targets. The officer added that the “emphasis is on
quantity and not on quality”.
A
source who worked in the division added that most of Gospel’s recommendations
were being nodded through without meaningful scrutiny: “We work quickly and
there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged
according to how many targets we manage to generate.”
Ethnic
cleansing plan
The
significance of these revelations—and what they disclose about Israel’s “war
aims”—should not be underestimated.
Previously,
the permanent siege on Gaza and Israel’s intermittent rampages based on the
Dahiya doctrine were used as tools for managing the enclave.
They
served as a constant reminder to Hamas of who is boss. The goal was to keep the
group focused on administrative duties rather than armed resistance: repairing
the destruction, devising ways to work around the siege, and restoring Hamas’
political legitimacy with a battle-weary wider public.
Now,
Israel’s aim appears much more comprehensive - and final. According to a report
in last week’s Financial Times, Israel is still in the early stages of a
campaign that could last up to a year.
Despite
the destruction of vast swaths of northern Gaza, and Israel’s current,
intensified rampage in the south, an official familiar with the Israel’s war
plans told the paper Israel still had a long way to go.
“This
will be a very long war… We’re currently not near halfway to achieving our
objectives.”
Most
of Gaza’s population is being herded into the Rafah area, pressed up against
the short border with Egypt. As has been explained in these pages before,
Israel has had a long-term ethnic cleansing plan, seeking to pressure Cairo
into rehousing Gaza’s population in Sinai.
The
rapid onset of disease and starvation in the enclave from Israel’s intensified
siege, denying the population food, water and power, is firmly aimed at forcing
Egypt’s hand.
‘Thinning’
the population
According
to Israel Hayom, an Israeli paper with historically close links to Netanyahu’s
ruling Likud party, officials in Washington have been presented with a scheme
to weaken Egyptian opposition further.
The
US would offer aid to other neighboring states conditioned on their accepting
refugees from Gaza, thereby lifting some of the burden from Egypt.
Additionally,
the paper’s Hebrew edition refers to a plan drafted at Netanyahu’s request by
Ron Dermer, one of his senior ministers, to “ thin the population in Gaza to
the barest minimum possible” through expulsions.The paper refers to this as a
“strategic goal” for Netanyahu.
Netanyahu
is reported to believe that, after the world has accepted millions of refugees
displaced from Iraq, Syria and Ukraine, why should Gaza be different?
The
plan envisions Palestinians leaving Gaza across the border with Egypt or
fleeing by boat to Europe and Africa.
Israel’s
genocidal destruction of Gaza, making it uninhabitable, is entirely consistent
both with its leaders’ stated aims of treating Palestinians as “human animals”
and with the whistleblowers’ revelations.
And
yet Western politicians and media continue maintaining the fiction that
Israel’s objectives are limited to “eliminating” Hamas - and that the only
legitimate question is whether Israel is acting “proportionately”.
This
wholesale failure to see the forest for the trees is not accidental. It is
evidence that Western elites are wholly complicit in Israel’s expulsion of
Palestinians from Gaza.
However
strong the proof, even when insiders disclose Israel’s policies of genocide and
mass ethnic cleansing, the West is determined to turn a blind eye.
No comments:
Post a Comment