Unparalleled Depravity as Israel Implements Its “Final Solution” for Gaza

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

On the night of May 15, and throughout the darkest hours of the morning of May 16, the genocidal State of Israel, as it promised ten days before, launched “Operation Gideon’s Chariots”, a plan that is nothing less than its “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem”, a plan as inhuman and depraved as the “final solution” that the Nazis approved for the “Jewish problem” at the Wannsee Conference in Germany in January 1942, which led, in the years that followed, to the industrial-scale expansion of extermination camps.

It ought to be inconceivable that this is happening, because, for 15 and a half months, from October 2023 to January this year, Israel had already been engaged in relentless genocidal assaults on the trapped civilian population in Gaza, in which almost the whole of the built environment was destroyed with Hiroshima-like fury, and at least 50,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed.

For six weeks, from January 19 until March 1, the ceaseless slaughter and destruction seemed to have finally come to an end, via a ceasefire deal in which the bombing stopped and humanitarian aid resumed, and Israeli hostages, seized on October 7, 2023, were exchanged for around 1,700 Palestinian prisoners and hostages.

On March 1, however, Israel violently broke the terms of the ceasefire deal, refusing to proceed to the second phase, which would have seen the release of the remaining Israeli hostages, and a definitive end to hostilities, and, yet again, imposing a complete siege on all supplies of food, water, medical supplies and fuel.

On March 18, Israel resumed its intensive bombing, claiming that both the policy of deliberate starvation and the resumption of largely arbitrary death from the skies were both necessary and valid as a means of putting pressure on Hamas to release the last of the hostages, prior to surrendering and being exiled from Gaza forever.

At this point, the countries of the world, which had largely remained consciously silent — or had even been directly complicit — as Israel had shredded every notion of decency and proportionality underpinning the establishment of international humanitarian law in response to the horrors of the Second World War should have intervened to stop the resumption of hostilities.

If nothing else, the ceasefire had exposed the extent of Israel’s depravity, as, in vast numbers, internally displaced Palestinians returned from the south to the north, to discover a landscape of apocalyptic devastation, which they duly filmed and showed to the world. That ought to have made the imposition of enforced starvation and the resumption of intensive bombing unthinkable, but instead of banning arms sales and imposing sanctions on Israel to isolate it, the world still did nothing meaningful.

Criticism of the starvation policy increased, as images of skeletal children poked at the tattered remains of world leaders’ consciences, and humanitarian organizations sounded ever more desperate alarms about the extent of the engineered famine, but the most potent criticism came from within Israel itself, from the families of the hostages, who insisted, correctly, that Netanyahu and his government are sacrificing their loved ones to further his unquenchable bloodlust, and also, cynically, to keep himself in power, and from former high-ranking officials in the military and the intelligence services, who, as well as backing the hostages’ families, also oppose the continuation of what former Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon has described as “a perpetual war with no achievable military objectives and which can only result in more loss of life and hatred.”

Words, however, are not, and have never been enough to stop Netanyahu and the far-right genocidal ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who he relies on to keep himself in power, and so, on May 4, the Israeli Security Cabinet approved “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” which, as anyone paying attention should realize, refers to an incident in the Bible when the Jews slaughtered 120,000 opponents.

The first aspect of the plan, as Netanyahu explained on May 5, called for the complete military occupation of Gaza. “Israeli soldiers would not go into Gaza, launch raids and then retreat”, Netanyahu said. “The intention is the opposite of that.” Clarifying his message, Israeli officials told news agencies that the plans included the “conquest” and “full military occupation of the entire Gaza Strip.”

As Axios reported, the plan also called for the IDF “to flatten any buildings that remain standing”, while “displac[ing] virtually the entire population of 2 million people to a single ‘humanitarian area’” in the south, which Netanyahu described as being for their “own protection”, although, as I reported in a recent article, Israel Wants to Kill Everyone in Gaza, the reality was far more sinister, as Israel also envisaged the displaced population being held in what can only be described as a concentration camp, run by private contractors, where only those who submit to a security policy involving biometric screening will be allowed food, which will only be provided every two weeks, and at the barest of subsistence levels to prevent death by starvation.

As if all of the above was not enough to demonstrate that Israel was plumbing new depths of depravity, the final aspect of the plan involved the illusion of “voluntary migration”, whereby those who find the situation intolerable will be encouraged to leave Gaza forever, to seek a new life in other countries, even though there is not, and has never been any suggestion that any other country on earth is prepared to take in a significant number of Palestinian refugees.

As the scale of Israel’s malevolent intent became clear, some politicians and mainstream media outlets in the west began, finally, to voice criticisms that they had previously refused to entertain, perhaps, I suspect (and as Jonathan Cook has indicated), because they could finally see that what Israel was committed to was indeed a policy of extermination, and that they needed to be able to demonstrate that they had made at least some effort to condemn it before, eventually, they will be called upon to answer awkward questions about their accountability and complicity.

In the UK, the growing dissent was most noticeable last week when a number of Tory MPs openly spoke out in the House of Commons, with Mark Pritchard condemning Israel for its genocide, and admitting that he was wrong to have supported Israel, “pretty much at all costs”, for the last 20 years, and Kit Malthouse, who asked what advice Keir Starmer and his ministers had received regarding the spurious legality of their actions for “when the reckoning comes.”

Despite the rumblings of dissent, however, the countdown to Israel’s implementation of its “final solution” proceeded without interruption, timed, as Israel had openly declared since May 5, to coincide with the end of Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East, on the morning of May 16.

Slightly preempting the end of Trump’s tour, Israel took advantage of the fact that May 14 was Independence Day — the 77th anniversary of the blood-soaked founding of the Israeli state, when Israel’s European Jewish terrorists established their colonial outpost via the blood of 15,000 Palestinians and the expulsion of 750,000 others — and May 15 was Nakba Day, when Palestinians mark and mourn the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, by increasing the scale of its bombing raids.

On Nakba Day itself, at least 143 Palestinians — mostly women and children — were killed in bombing raids, one of the highest daily death tolls, as the graph below shows, and as night fell the new operation began in earnest.

Israel increases the intensity of its attacks, as “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” begins

At 10.20pm on May 15, the Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi posted an alarming video on X, of massed Israeli tanks and bulldozers preparing to launch a ground invasion of northern Gaza, and stated, “Heavy reinforcements on the Gaza border tonight, gearing up for what’s expected to be a brutal slaughterhouse-like invasion.”

I immediately reposted it, saying, “This is absolutely terrifying. Israel appears to be preparing to ‘open the gates of hell’ on Gaza via a ground invasion, as though, for the last 19 months, it hadn’t already plumbed unimagined depths of depravity.”

Within two hours, desperate posts began emerging from northern Gaza. The first I saw, just before midnight, was from Omar Hamad, a pharmacist and writer, who stated, simply, “Worst 2 hrs since the genocide started.”

In the hours that followed, a deluge of desperate messages poured out of Gaza. Amir, responding to Omar’s post, wrote, “Gaza Now Now Now Please please Israel is raining hell on Gaza right now! Families are being bombed relentlessly while starving. Children are dying in the dark — no food, no water, no way out. Non-stop massacres unfolding in real time.”

The screenshots below capture the sense of absolute panic, as death and destruction rained down on multiple fronts, with numerous commentators comparing the severity of the attacks to the first days of Israel’s genocidal assault, back in October 2023.

As MO wrote:

An hour later, in his running commentary, MO posted:

It was via MO, at 1am on May 16, that I first heard that the tanks were advancing, and that Israeli troops were on the ground, separating the men from the women and children in a shelter west of Beit Lahia, and “arresting” them. 

“The disaster happened”, MO wrote in another post. “Israeli tanks are advancing. The Israeli army surrounded a shelter west of Beit Lahia, carried out arrests among civilians, and demanded via loudspeakers that displaced women and children evacuate the area.”

Meanwhile, Translating Falasteen (Palestine) reported that “quadcopter drone speakers [were] calling out to besieged civilians in the northwestern parts of the Gaza Strip: ‘Don’t leave or else you will get shot.’”

Translating Falasteen also posted an audio recording of “an Israeli occupation soldier us[ing] a Palestinian child as a human shield at a displacement center in Beit Lahia, ordering him through a megaphone to enter the building and verify if anyone remained inside”, adding, “The center, filled with families displaced by months of bombardment, had been surrounded by the Israeli occupation army in the early hours of the morning. In a separate recording from the same incident, Israeli forces can be heard commanding civilians to strip to their underwear.”

By morning, the extent of Israel’s devastation became apparent. At least a hundred Palestinians had been killed overnight — against, mostly women and children — as the Israeli military seemed specifically to have targeted some of the few remaining buildings still standing in northern Gaza, which were destroyed with entire families inside.

Despite the fact that this clearly fulfilled Israel’s promise “to flatten any buildings that remain standing” — an instruction that explicitly failed to even consider any distinction between civilians and combatants — the mainstream media in the west still largely parroted Israel’s lies. Sky News, for example, unquestioningly quoted the IDF stating that “it had struck ‘over 150 terror targets’ across the Gaza Strip in the previous 24 hours — an average of one airstrike every 10 minutes”, even though there was no evidence that a single target struck had constituted anything resembling a legitimate “terror target.”

Last night, the carnage continued, as relentlessly — or worse — than the night before. In an update around midnight, Omar Hamad posted, These hours now are much worse than yesterday’s hours. The heart can no longer bear it.”

At 12.35pm, Mahmoud Massri, a biomedical engineer, wrote, “If we die, don’t forget me … the bombing around us never stops. You won’t forget that I loved life, that I dreamed endlessly, and that I fought with all my strength to protect my family. I feel the end is drawing very near … so we say goodbye, with all the love our hearts can hold.”

Mahmoud survived the night, writing, at 8.39am, “I survived one of the hardest nights of my life. The tanks and occupation vehicles were extremely close, firing randomly — bullets even hit the walls of the school we are living in. My siblings were terrified, and fear alone felt like it could kill us. Our energy is completely drained … and now we are dying of hunger.”

Many others didn’t survive, however, and meanwhile, on Israeli TV, Zvi Sukkot, a member of the Knesset, and a member of the Religious Zionism Party, breezily discussed how “Everyone got used to the idea that [we] can kill 100 Gazans in one night. And nobody in the world cares.”

Although some world leaders contradicted Sukhot’s words, with Al Jazeera reporting that “the leaders of Ireland, Spain, Iceland, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway and Slovenia” had all “called on Israel to halt its attacks on Gaza and allow humanitarian aid into the enclave, dubbing the situation a ‘man-made catastrophe’”, nothing beyond words wafted Israel’s way, and, as has been established over the last 19 months, Israel doesn’t really care what anyone has to say about its actions.

The role of Donald Trump

In all of the above, the most startling absence, internationally, is the United States.

While Donald Trump has been touring the Gulf, seeking tributes and trade deals from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, he has been either silent or incoherent regarding Israel’s renewed horror in Gaza.

Initially, some observers hoped that his failure to visit Israel as part of his four-day tour signified a rift with Netanyahu, but that seems to have been nothing but projection.

Instead, he allowed Hamas to believe that they would receive support from him regarding the reimplementation of a ceasefire and the resumption of the delivery of humanitarian aid if they released Edan Alexander, the sole remaining US-Israeli soldier still held in Gaza as a hostage (or, more accurately, as a prisoner of war).

That, however, turned out to be a mirage when Hamas released Alexander, only to discover that Trump had failed to do anything to reward them.

Instead, in a rambling message delivered to reporters on May 14, he revived the absurd plan he had floated in February, when Netanyahu visited the White House, for the US to take over Gaza.

“Gaza has been a territory of death and destruction for many years”, he said, adding, “I have concepts for Gaza that I think are very good. Make it a freedom zone, let the United States get involved, and make it just a freedom zone. Have a real freedom zone, because it seems that Gaza, every time, every 10 years, it happens, and more than that, it really happens all throughout, it never solved the Gaza problem. If it’s necessary, I think I’d be proud to have the United States have it, take it, make it a freedom zone, let some good things happen. Put people in homes where they can be safe.”

He also spoke about October 7, as though he had been specifically briefed just before the reporters arrived, saying, “Hamas is going to have to be dealt with. Remember, October 7 was one of the worst days in the history of the world, I think, not just, not just local to this region, it was one of the worst, most atrocious attacks anyone’s ever seen.”

Now back in the US, Trump has marked his return by openly reviving the other absurd, but far more dangerous notion that he floated in February to the delight of Israel’s far-right — that the population of the Gaza Strip needs to be relocated for humanitarian reasons, as though he has no idea that the forced displacement, or ethnic cleansing of an entire population is one of the gravest crimes imaginable.

Yesterday evening, NBC News reported that, after speaking to five people within the Trump administration, they were able to confirm that officials are “working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya”, although a spokesperson within the administration later told the broadcaster, “these reports are untrue”, adding, “The situation on the ground is untenable for such a plan. Such a plan was not discussed and makes no sense.”

Nevertheless, the US and Israel have both demonstrated, in recent months, that they have been shopping around for wildly unsuitable countries to become accomplices in their grotesque ethnic cleansing fantasies.

Whether or not he even knows it, Trump’s incoherent ramblings about Gaza — the notion of its complete takeover, the ethnic cleansing of its entire population for spurious humanitarian reasons, and his occasional outbursts about “opening the gates of hell” on Gaza if all the hostages are not immediately released — have profoundly influenced Israeli policies in the last few months, and have undoubtedly fed into the development of “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” as a viable endgame for Israel’s unforgivable ambitions after 19 months of genocide.

As the “final solution” unfolds, in all its grisly horrors, who could have foreseen that it would be happening under the watch of a US president who may not even understand the extent of his involvement in enabling it to happen?

* * * * *

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.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.