Israel’s Sickening and Depraved Options for Gaza: Extermination, Concentration Camps or the Illusion of “Voluntary Migration”

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I remember when I last had hope.

I last had hope for six weeks — from January 19 this year, until March 1 — when the relentless genocide in Gaza, the most soul-stripping depravity any of us have ever witnessed, seemed to have come to an end. Before that, I hadn’t had any hope for 15 and a half months — including the whole of 2024; every damned second of it.

Millions of us have felt the same; as though a noose was permanently around our necks, strangling all joy, the colour drained out of existence like a corpse, but we have been powerless to prevent Israel’s leaders, and our own complicit leaders, from doing anything to stop it, as though it was some sort of natural disaster.

Those six weeks of hope were the first phase of a ceasefire agreement, when Israel’s incessant bombing stopped, when humanitarian aid supplies resumed, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians returned from the south to the north in a defiant show of strength and solidarity, and when 33 Israeli hostages were freed in exchange for nearly 1,800 Palestinian prisoners and hostages.

At the end of three phases, according to the ceasefire agreement, Israel was meant to withdraw its troops from Gaza, ending the conflict and allowing reconstruction to begin.

Like a serial killer, however, constrained to temporarily halt his butchery because he is coming under increasing scrutiny, Israel couldn’t wait to resume its killing with an ever greater ferocity.

On March 1, it tore up the ceasefire agreement and re-imposed a murderous siege, in which nothing — neither food, water, medicine or fuel — has been allowed into Gaza ever since. 17 days later, on March 18, it resumed its indiscriminate slaughter with even more enthusiasm than before, its existence, as has been the case consistently since October 7, 2023, now being solely to kill Palestinians.

I doubt that any of us can truly imagine what this dead-eyed commitment to endless slaughter does to irredeemably blacken the human heart. Israel deserves all that is to come — shunned as a permanent pariah, its Prime Minister a wanted war criminal and international fugitive from justice, its economy broken, its tourist industry in tatters, its soldiers, hunted down through the courts around the world, and also, crucially, haunted by the ghosts of rampant PTSD, which will devour those who so giddily and self-righteously engaged in genocide, and glorified in filming themselves while committing war crimes.

Less known yet is how this PTSD will impact the more hidden soldiers — the air force pilots relentlessly dropping the bombs, the snipers relentlessly killing children, those directing the drones and armed quadcopters from safe, distant locations, also very deliberately killing children and other civilians as though real life — and death — is nothing more than a video game.

Nothing but extermination

For now, however — right now — the world is irretrievably broken. The remaining Palestinians in Gaza are starving in vast numbers, dying of thirst, dying of preventable diseases and pre-existing medical conditions for which treatment ought to exist, but no longer does, dying in hideous and repeated bombing raids in which over 1,200 people, mostly civilians, have been killed since March 18, to add to the 50,000 killed between October 2023 and the start of the ceasefire, and dying when forced to evacuate and being shot and bombed indiscriminately. And none of this even touches on the possibly hundreds of thousands who are already consigned to death from secondary causes.

All of the above also took place throughout the first 15 and a half months of the genocide, as Israel destroyed almost the entirety of a densely populated built-up area that is a quarter of the size of London, imposed a “complete siege” on all supplies, waged a sickening and persistent war on Gaza’s hospitals, and abducted thousands of people to be imprisoned and tortured, and in some cases raped and murdered in Israel’s notoriously brutal and lawless prisons for Palestinians.

Israel also destroyed most people’s homes, forcing them to evacuate to live in makeshift tents in squalid conditions, without running water, swimming in sewage and filth, where they remained targets despite being told that there were “safe zones.” From the beginning, it was clear that there are no “safe zones” in Gaza, that absolutely nowhere is safe from the permanent threat of death.

Now, however, the messages coming out of Gaza are apocalyptic, comparable only to the earliest weeks of the genocide, but with those still alive having endured unbearable terror and deprivation for, what, on Monday, will be a year and a half of ceaseless slaughter.

Israel’s aim is extermination, although it tells lies, as it always does, to deny that most startlingly obvious reality. Throughout the genocide, aims and plans have been proposed, demanded and altered, with the only constants being Netanyahu’s meaningless insistence on “total victory” and on somehow “eradicating” Hamas.

This time around, having shredded the ceasefire agreement, Israel demands the release of all the remaining hostages, and demands that all Hamas members leave Gaza, never to return. What it offers in return, however, is not peace, but the “voluntary migration” of the whole of the civilian population, supported by Donald Trump, who has been paid lavishly to support Israel, and who, most crucially, has very evidently given Israel every encouragement it could possibly want to engage in annihilatory destruction without even a murmur of criticism.

Israel’s far-right embraced Trump’s enthusiasm for “voluntary migration”, which he portrayed as a humanitarian gesture, and even cheered on his fantasies about the US taking over Gaza and creating “the Riviera of the Middle East” — even though, for the fanatical settlers, their only dream is that they themselves, the “chosen people” — not Christians whose existence they only tolerate — ruthlessly colonize it, as they intend to do with the West Bank.

The reality, as it has always been, is that there is nowhere for the Palestinians to go. Egypt and Jordan daren’t capitulate to US pressure, because that will destroy them politically, and no other country can realistically be expected to take in two million refugees (or however many still survive), especially, as in the west, almost every country is dominated by anti-immigrant sentiment — especially if those they are meant to take in have all been tarred as “terrorists” and outrageously slandered as “baby-killers.”

This means that Israel’s only realistic aim is extermination — or, perhaps, as a chilling but illuminating article in +972 Magazine, “Israel’s latest vision for Gaza has a name: Concentration camp”, explained last week, herding the remaining population, sufficiently “thinned out”, as Netanyahu explained in the early months of the genocide, into tightly-controlled concentration camps in whatever tiny parts of Gaza remain after Israel militarily reoccupies it, and sets up vast buffer zones to protect itself from the truth that it cannot countenance — that any kind of peace can only be achieved through treating the Palestinians with dignity and respect and allowing them to run their own lives on their own land.

Is it, sadly, time to actually consider a refugee solution?

While most Palestinian and pro-Palestinian positions emphasize the justifiability and necessity of continued resistance, and the extraordinary bonds that the Palestinians have with their land, and with each other, other Palestinian voices are rarely being heard, even though some, recognizing that the collapse of the ceasefire agreement also signifies the collapse of any conceivable diplomatic end to Israel’s genocide, are so sick of living under the permanent specter of imminent death that they are prepared to leave, if other countries will take them in.

One of these voices is Dr. Ezzideen, a doctor who runs a clinic in Gaza, and who, on X, has been providing some of the most compelling and articulate reports about the realities on the ground. In a post on April 3, seen by over 135,000 people, he wrote the following, which I urge you to read and reflect upon.

No one leaves home unless the home leaves you first.

Yesterday, a news outlet said: “Foreign countries may soon allow Gazans to leave.” No confirmations. Just a rumor. But it was enough.

Overnight, thousands lit up the silence: “How can we leave? Who do we contact? Where do we go?”

Dozens, posting under real names, real faces, knowing it could cost them everything, wrote the same thing: “I’m from Gaza. I’m urgently seeking a way out, through any means: a crossing, a humanitarian corridor, an organization, a miracle.”

Please understand, we didn’t want to leave.

We loved our land more than our lungs. Our olive trees. Our graves. Our wedding photos buried in dust. Our childhood rooms shattered by airstrikes.

But we love our children more. We love the ones we still have. We love our mothers, who have learned to wrap fear like a scarf around their heads.

We stayed when the bombs fell. We stayed when the power left. We stayed when the hospitals collapsed. We stayed when the world watched in high definition.

And now, we are asking, not for comfort. Not even for justice. Just for a way out.

Please do not mistake us for traitors. But even a tree will crawl if its roots are burned. Even a pigeon will run when the sky turns against her.

This is not surrender. This is survival.

If you hear us, if you read our comments, if you hold power or voice or kindness, answer us. Not tomorrow. Not in theory. Now.

So is it time?

No one who has seen videos or photos of the renewed intensity of Israel’s genocide in Gaza over the last two weeks should be in any doubt about how this is, essentially, the most apocalyptic time in the whole of the last 18 months of relentless horrors. Not only is the bombing excruciatingly incessant and intense, but the survivors, starved and forced to evacuate — again — and deprived of hospitals and even basic medical supplies, have been pushed to the very limits of human endurance.

Death is everywhere, and the world has failed Gaza — the west, with its indifference, or its active complicity (particularly, the US, Germany and the UK), the Arab and wider Muslim world, and the international community via the UN, where the US holds an unassailable veto, and the International Court of Justice — though warning of a “plausible genocide” in January last year, and issuing on opinion in July condemning Israel’s entire 58-year occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem — has no power to act on or enforce its rulings.

Even the most presumptively powerful global court — the International Criminal Court — has failed to significantly dent Israel’s impunity, despite issuing arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in November. Both men are now unable to travel freely, although they remain welcome in the US, and Hungary also just welcomed Netanyahu, belligerently withdrawing from the Rome Statute, which empowers the ICC, leading to the possibility that other countries will follow suit.

As I noted above, despite the entreaties of Dr. Ezzideen and the thousands of people he described, who lit up the silence, asking, “How can we leave? Who do we contact? Where do we go?”, I find it hard to imagine that handing Israel the victory it wants is even achievable, but I do think it’s important that we properly reflect on his words, delivered from the heart of the horrors, where only certain death, starvation in a concentration camp, or the dream of escape seem to be possibilities.

I hesitate to imagine it, but my mind, unbidden, conjures up images of Palestinian families — of children, mothers and fathers — finally being safe, and, also unbidden, conjures up images of the hell that would await the settler-colonial conquerors if their depraved dreams ever came true: reclaiming a toxic, poisoned, ecocidal landscape of their own creation, which may well be unsalvageable, still filled with the thousands of corpses of those murdered in pursuit of an irretrievably evil messianic fantasy, whose ghosts, I imagine, will forever haunt the land and those who seek to occupy it.

In a world in which only materialism and self-interest are meant to have survived, in which a genocide can, realistically, be seen as, at least to some extent, nothing more troubling to many observers than “gentrification” or “real estate opportunities”, we aren’t meant to believe in ghosts anymore. Whether spiritually or psychologically, however, I believe that they still exist, and, as I noted above, that they will haunt Israel — and its accomplices — forever.

While people still live, however, the priority must be their survival, as Dr. Ezzideen so powerfully explained: “We loved our land more than our lungs … But we love our children more. We love the ones we still have”, and “we are asking … for a way out.”

Who will answer his plea?

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

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