Israel has made no secret of it: it has embarked on a genocidal plan to “create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable.” And Joe Biden is its accomplice.
by Seth Ackerman
Part 1
25,000 Palestinians, an estimated 70 percent of them women and children, in what a leading scholar of aerial bombing has called “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.” Israel has been killing more than five times as many Gazans per day as the Nazis did, per capita, in the London Blitzkrieg. It killed roughly fifteen times as many children in the war’s first two months alone as Russia did in Ukraine in the invasion’s first eighteen months.
The Associated Press, citing analysts who specialize in mapping wartime bombing damage, reported that “the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.” Israel’s campaign has destroyed the homes of a third of Gaza’s residents, damaged almost two-thirds of all dwellings, and displaced 85 percent of its population, or 1.9 million people, through forced evacuations. More than ten Gazan children per day, on average, are estimated to have lost one or both of their legs.
The carnage is entirely deliberate. As a leaked analysis by the Dutch defense attaché in Tel Aviv put it, Israel “intends to deliberately cause enormous destruction to the infrastructure and civilian centers”; this is what explains the “high number of deaths” among civilians.
Israel’s claim that the civilian destruction is the inadvertent consequence of strikes targeting Hamas fighters is merely “a fig leaf for harming the civilian population,” according to a detailed investigation of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) targeting protocols published jointly by the Israeli news sites +972 and Local Call. Citing “conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community,” journalist Yuval Abraham reported that the IDF’s established procedure is to identify the type of civilian site it wishes to destroy, such as a residential high-rise, and then afterward search a database to find some link to a militant group.
Within the IDF, strikes of this nature are called “power targets.” “If you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so,” explained a former intelligence official quoted in the report. Official claims that such targets are tied to Hamas are “an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza,” said a source who was involved in developing targets in previous rounds of fighting in Gaza. “That is what they told us.”
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