Visualizing Israel’s Goal of Making Gaza Uninhabitable

The New York Times today published an interactive feature titled “Gaza After Nine Weeks of War”, which shows “before” and “after” satellite imagery that provides a glimpse into the sheer scale of the destruction that the Israeli military has been wreaking in the Gaza Strip with openly genocidal intent.

Gaza must be made unhabitable. That is the transparent goal of Israel’s military operation, described by the Times as “one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the 21st century”, and the Palestinians are being delivered the message in no uncertain terms that they can either flee across the border into Egypt to live as refugees in tent cities in the Sinai desert, or they can die.

Of course, there really is no choice for the Palestinians. There were first told to flee the north of Gaza to the south while Israel was also bombing the south. Now Israel has told them to flee the south, too, and they have nowhere else to go.

Egypt has refused to allow a flow of Palestinian refugees through the Rafah crossing because Egypt refuses to accept responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe that Israel has created. The choice Palestinians are left with is to remain in Gaza and perish, whether from the indiscriminate bombing, from lack of potable water, from lack of nutrition, or from disease.

The title of the New York Times’ feature is misleading since the word “war” conjures up the idea of opposing military forces fighting each other, but that is not what has been happening in Gaza. The stateless Palestinians living in what then head of Israel’s National Security Council Giora Eiland described in 2004 as a “huge concentration camp” have no military.

There are armed militias in Gaza like Hamas, whose members may equip themselves with such weapons as AK-47 rifles, hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenades, and crude rockets with no precise targeting capability. But Palestinians have no tanks or other more advanced weaponry that people associate with the idea of a “war” between two military powers. They have no navy. They have no air force, no fighter jets, no bombers, no attack helicopters, no missile defense systems. While militant groups in Gaza have a non-zero capacity to put up armed resistance to Israel’s ground operations, the civilian population of Gaza is essentially defenseless.

The Israeli military, by contrast, is ranked among the most powerful in the world. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are equipped with modern artillery, howitzers, guided missiles, multiple rocket launchers, armored vehicles, tanks, combat armored bulldozers, warplanes, combat helicopters, and warships. The IDF’s arsenal includes US-supplied F-16, F-15, and F-35 fighter aircraft, and Cobra and Apache attack helicopters.

In short, what the world is witnessing is not a “war”, as the headlines and TV news title overlays proclaim. It is not two states having it out with their respective armies. It is a campaign of death and destruction being waged by an Occupying Power armed with one of the most powerful militaries in the world against the defenseless civilian population confined within the Gaza concentration camp.

It is not “war”. It is genocide.

For two months, I have been greeted by objections from people within my networks and within my reader community to my characterizations of Israel’s military operations. Some of the objectors evidently share Israel’s desire for Gaza to be rendered uninhabitable and for the Palestinians to be exterminated. Among the objectors who pretend to be guided by a moral conscience, the objections all revolve around the belief that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world” and does everything possible to prevent harm to civilians.

At this point, given the ease with which anyone can access information about what Israel is actually doing in Gaza, to persist in that belief is sheer willful ignorance and self-delusion. The truth is right in front of anyone who wishes to know the truth. People defending Israel’s genocide in Gaza choose to believe their own lies, which they tell themselves to try to sustain their preconceived ideas about the state of Israel, and about the nature of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and about America’s role in the world.

To be clear, the US government under President Joe Biden is absolutely complicit in this crime against humanity. Its complicity was starkly illustrated on December 8 in the UN Security Council when the US, which wields a veto power, stood alone in voting against a resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, thus delivering the message to Israel that it may carry on its genocidal operation with impunity.

The casualty estimates by themselves belie the preposterous claim, completely divorced from reality, that Israel is trying to prevent harm to civilians. As I reported yesterday, the Palestinian death toll is over 18,200, with 70% of the dead being women and children. In just the first three weeks of Israel’s “Operation Swords of Iron”, over 3,200 children were killed, which is more children killed than in all of the rest of the world’s conflict zones combined in each of the years 2020, 2021, and 2022. The estimated number of children who have been killed now is over 7,700.

The defenders of this crime against humanity like to claim that the data from the Gaza Health Ministry cannot be trusted, but that is just more willful ignorance. The fact is that UN agencies and international human rights organizations cite the Health Ministry’s data as roughly accurate because in each of Israel’s prior military assaults on Gaza, its death estimates proved to be close approximations of the subsequently verified numbers.

It’s true now, though, that the numbers can no longer be considered accurate. That’s because, by November 11, Gaza’s health care system had become so crippled by Israel’s bombardment that the Health Ministry ceased being able to even attempt to count the dead. It has since resumed providing updated estimates, with health workers heroically attempting to do what they can with a crippled health care system in the face of horrific atrocities, but the harsh reality is that the numbers being provided are underestimates by virtue of the fact that thousands of Palestinians are missing, some possibly still alive, but with an untold number now buried dead under the rubble.

For those who have a love of truth as opposed to choosing strong delusion, following are a few screenshots from the Times’ interactive feature about the destruction in northern Gaza.

Keep in mind as you view these images that Israel has vowed to repeat this devastation now in southern Gaza, with Israeli leaders openly declaring the aim of making Gaza uninhabitable. You can see in these images that these are not mere words; it is what Israel is visibly aiming to accomplish on the ground.

Here is a “before” image of the coastline in northern Gaza where the Times has highlighted a beach resort and two large groups of greenhouses:

And here is what it looks like now:

As you can see, Israel completely leveled the entire area. This is not targeting Hamas. It is destroying the economy and the landscape of Gaza to make it uninhabitable, a land in which Palestinians will no longer be able to continue to survive.

A bit southward down the coast, here is another “before” image:

And here is the “after” image where you can once again see Israel’s destruction of agricultural land in addition to the complete leveling of buildings along the beachfront and other devastation:

Here is another “before” image:

And here is the “after” image showing how Israel is systematically destroying Gaza’s farmlands in furtherance of its aim to make Gaza uninhabitable:

As the Times notes, “These images capture only a fraction of the destruction across the Gaza Strip. Recent assessments indicate that more than half of the buildings in northern Gaza show signs of damage.”

I have no patience left for people who are so morally unprincipled that they still persist in defending what Israel is doing, or who choose to bury their heads so deeply up their asses that they cannot see the crime against humanity that is being perpetrated right in front of them, in full view of the world, with explicitly genocidal intent, and with impunity because of US support.

It’s not “war”. It’s genocide.