Israeli troops in North Gaza: you may be complicit in a war crime

Displaced Palestinians ordered by the Israeli military to evacuate northern Gaza flee amid an Israeli military operation, late October 2024

Tomer Persico writes in Haaretz on 31 October 2024:

The ongoing military operation in the northern Gaza Strip, which includes the third Israel Defense Forces invasion of the Jabalya refugee camp in the course of the war, purports to deal with Hamas terrorists who have regrouped in the area; it must be noted that the orders received by the IDF reflect this goal. But the campaign also seems to conceal a grave scenario: the expulsion of the residents of the northern Strip in order to prepare the ground for future settlements of Israeli Jews.

On October 21, as senior cabinet ministers and coalition lawmakers addressed a conference titled Preparing to Settle Gaza, journalist Amit Segal stated: “What is happening in northern Gaza is different from everything that we have seen before today. You can deny until tomorrow that the story is not the implementation of the ‘generals’ plan’ – emptying the [northern] Strip, starving the terrorists, eliminating and capturing them – that’s what I think is happening there, and in my opinion this is only the pilot or trailer.”

Segal, who is known to be close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is referring to the plan proposed by Maj. Gen. (ret.) Giora Eiland, which calls for ordering the remaining Palestinians in the northern Strip to move to the south and placing anyone who remains under siege, including starving and killing them, on the assumption that they are Hamas terrorists. When the plan was published, 27 Knesset members and cabinet ministers signed a letter urging its adoption and Netanyahu said he would consider it. Now it seems that he has. It appears that the plan is being implemented and that what is currently happening is, according to Segal, only a “pilot or trailer” for things to come.

Yaniv Kubovich also reported that field commanders told him, “the recent decision to launch operations in northern Gaza was taken without any in-depth discussion. They said it appeared that the operations were aimed principally at pressuring local residents, who were again told to evacuate the area for the coast as winter is approaching. It is possible that the operation is laying the groundwork for a decision by the government to put into effect [Eiland’s] so-called surrender or starve plan.”

Haaretz defense analyst Amos Harel noted: “To what the army portrays as an effort to cut out the Hamas infrastructure that has regrown in the camp, the far-right aims to add a darker side – driving the civil population out of it.”

Also in a conversation with a former senior defense official, who is in contact with senior field commanders, it was made clear to me that what is happening in northern Gaza is an ethnic cleansing attempt.

Testimonies from the northern Strip support this concern: The operation is focused not on finding and killing terrorists, but rather on the systematic destruction of buildings, including even hospitals (on October 18, the IDF bombed the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia and the Al Awda hospital in Jabalya), thereby forcing area residents to evacuate or die. In the process, the army distributes leaflets demanding the residents of a few neighborhoods to leave and even publishes video and photos of fleeing Palestinians.

Add to this the emerging discourse among politicians, and the conference where the finance and the national security minister, among others, spoke explicitly about settlement in the Strip, add the fact that the event and its message were not met with opposition from the prime minister, add in the composition of the inner cabinet, consider the proximity to the U.S. election and you will reach the conclusion that there is a reasonable suspicion that Israel is seeking to expel the Palestinians from the northern Gaza Strip to carry out a population transfer in order to settle Jews there.

It must be made clear to the soldiers participating in the operation in the northern Strip: You may be complicit in an attempted mass expulsion of Palestinians not for defense purposes, but rather for ethnic cleansing. This means that you may be complicit in a war crime. The individual soldier at the bottom of the chain of command is not exposed to the overall context of the operation, but every soldier in the field has a duty to determine whether an attempt is being made to permanently expel the Palestinian residents from the northern Strip to the south.

In 1989, Amos Oz stated that if the idea of “expulsion and exile of the Arabs” is ever raised, principled Israelis must make it clear that they will not permit this: “We will not let you expel the Arabs even if we have to divide the state and the army, even if we have to lie under the wheels of the trucks.” One year later, Yair Tzaban and Yossi Sarid wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth that “the day the transfer order, which is patently illegal, is given shall also be the day of refusal to obey an order.”

IDF soldiers must know whether this day has arrived. The government and the heads of the military must say, publicly and unequivocally, that there is no plan to expel the residents of northern Gaza, and they must provide minimal conditions to the area’s residents so that they can continue living there now as well. It is forbidden under any circumstances to be complicit in war crimes and ethnic cleansing.

Tomer Persico is a research fellow at Jerusalem’s Shalom Hartman Institute and a Rubinstein fellow at Israel’s Reichman University.

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