One week after the resumption of the genocide in Gaza, the death toll is catastrophic: nearly 800 dead, including a large number of children. Access to humanitarian aid has been completely cut off for more than three weeks. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are bombing hospitals, homes, and civilian infrastructure. On Monday, Israel announced it had attacked more than 100 pickup trucks under the pretext that they could be used by the Al Qassam Brigades.
With the resumption of negotiations stalled and the imperialist powers continuing to openly support Israel’s massacres in the enclave, the future looks bleaker than ever for Gazans. The new Army Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, has said he wants to complete what Israel has been trying to do since October 2023: eliminate any Hamas presence in Gaza. This means an escalation of indiscriminate bombing and the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure. But above all, this goal is now compounded by the threat of an unprecedented military deployment.
Invasion
According to the Wall Street Journal, plans for a massive ground invasion have been drawn up and could be implemented very quickly. The army has already regained control of the Netzarim corridor and is conducting incursions into Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip in an effort to expand its buffer zone. It is also present in Rafah, Khan Younis, as well as the Tel al-Sultan refugee camp, which is surrounded by the IDF after a massive bombardment that left more than fifty dead.
The goal is to smother Hamas by occupying large swathes of territory and maintaining a significant military presence there, leaving it nowhere to retreat. In earlier phases of the war, the army typically withdrew after capturing an area, giving Hamas the opportunity to reestablish itself. This time, the goal is to gradually reduce any room for maneuver, eliminating each pocket of resistance piecemeal. This would be accompanied by a gradual and systematic destruction of Hamas’s entire tunnel network.
This exclusively military strategy risks being rejected by the Israeli opposition and a large segment of public opinion, which would initially prefer a political solution — that is, the resumption of negotiations — to secure the release of all the remaining hostages, even if it means resuming the war to settle the “Palestinian problem.” But the new war council, centered around Israel Katz and Eyal Zamir, is taking a much more radical line than the previous one. According to them, the “defeat” of Hezbollah, the fall of the Assad regime, and the fact that the Houthis are facing incessant U.S. bombing now gives them a free hand to achieve what they have so far failed to accomplish: the total elimination of Hamas.
Along the same lines, the IDF has intensified its strategy of targeting senior Hamas political staff. Since the resumption of the genocide, several central figures in the Gaza government have been eliminated, including the enclave’s prime minister, Issam al-Da’alis, as well as his presumed successor, Ismail Barhoum. Also killed were the justice minister, the interior minister, the finance minister, and the head of Hamas’s security agency.
Annexation
But beyond the cabinet rhetoric, the plan, as Haaretz reported Friday, aims for the total occupation of Gaza, accompanied by the establishment of an Israeli military administration, modeled on the one in force between 1967 and 1994. One of its central missions would be to organize the expulsion of the entire Gazan population, in accordance with the ethnic cleansing plan promoted by Donald Trump. Initially, Gaza’s two million inhabitants would be confined to a small “humanitarian” zone, where food aid would not exceed the minimum calories necessary for their survival.
The aim: Israel’s full annexation of Gaza. As L’Orient-Le-Jour summarizes, “Before [Israel Katz], no Israeli official had gone so far with regard to Gaza. There were threats to destroy it, depopulate it, occupy it — which was done — but never to annex it. The taboo has fallen: Gaza will be Israeli or it will not exist.”
However, before he can carry out his project, Netanyahu will have to deal with a series of contradictions. Israel is mired in an unprecedented internal crisis, compounded by a major political crisis. Seventy-three percent of Israelis want the prime minister to resign, a figure that has increased since his attempt to remove the Shin Bet chief. Meanwhile, a mutiny of reservists is underway: exhausted by the war, many now refuse to continue living the horrors of Gaza.
The project of totally eradicating Gaza is possible thanks to the unconditional support Netanyahu enjoys, first from the Biden and then the Trump administrations, but also from the European powers, which support and shamelessly participate in the genocide. The cynical refrain, repeated ad nauseam, of “Israel’s right to defend itself” finds its logical conclusion here: the realization of genocide and annexation.
Originally published in Spanish on March 27 in La Izquierda Diario.
Translation by Otto Fors