Since cancelling the ceasefire with Hamas in March, Israel has intensified its genocidal war on Gaza.
The Israeli state openly aims to drive the Palestinians out, and can count on United States President Donald Trump’s support for this.
Israeli defence minister Israel Katz announced on April 15 that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had completed the takeover of the so-called “Morag axis” — the corridor that stretches about 12 kilometres from Gaza’s east to west. This cuts off Rafah in the south from neighbouring Khan Younis and from its border crossing with Egypt.
The IDF also reoccupied the Netzarim Corridor on March 19 in central Gaza, a 4km-wide strip that runs east to west, separating southern from northern Gaza. Under the ceasefire, the IDF had partially withdrawn from the area.
Breaking the Silence
The IDF have also gradually widened the “buffer zone” along Gaza’s eastern border to 1.6km wide in places, with the goal of emptying it of Palestinians.
Israeli human rights group Breaking the Silence (BTS) released a new report, The Perimeter, on April 7, which said in its introduction that: “To create this area, Israel launched a major military engineering operation that, by means of wholesale destruction, entirely reshaped about 16% of the Gaza Strip … an area previously home to some 35% of Gaza’s agricultural land.”
BTS is a group of IDF veterans, who have served since the start of the Second Intifada (September, 2000). It collects soldiers’ testimonies and exposes the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories.
“The mission given to soldiers in the field, as revealed in their testimonies, was to create an empty, completely flat expanse about a kilometer wide along the Gaza side of the border fence. This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished,” said the report.
“Palestinians were denied entry into the area altogether, a ban which was enforced using live fire, including machine gun fire and tank shells. In this way, the military created a death zone of enormous proportions.
“Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland, a strip of land eradicated in its entirety.”
‘Kill zone’
BTS interviewed many soldiers in preparing its report and said their testimonies “demonstrate that soldiers were given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions.
“Palestinians who dared enter the perimeter, even accidentally, were also targeted, including civilian men, women, children and elders.”
As reported in Common Dreams: “The officers and soldiers interviewed by BTS struggled to explain whether noncombatants were informed of the no-go zone’s limits, with one saying civilians knew to stay away when they saw that ‘enough people died or got injured’ crossing the unmarked boundary.
“Some people who entered the perimeter out of sheer desperation were targeted. Israel’s blockade of Gaza has fueled widespread and sometimes deadly starvation, and Palestinians entered the ‘kill zone’ to pick hubeiza, a nutritious wild plant, after the area’s farmland was razed.”
One reserve warrant officer told BTS: “The IDF is really fulfilling the public’s wishes, which state: ‘There are no innocents in Gaza. We’ll show them.’"
“People were incriminated for having bags in their hands. Guy showed up with a bag? Incriminated, terrorist. I believe they came to pick hubeiza, but … boom, tank shells were fired at him from half a mile away.”
The same officer said that when the IDF invaded Gaza, “I went there because they killed us and now we are going to kill them. And I found out that we’re not only killing them, we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs. We’re destroying their houses and pissing on their graves.”
Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in December about a similar “kill zone” in the Netzarim Corridor, where troops were ordered to shoot “anyone who enters”.
The Associated Press reported that “Israel now controls more than 50% of the territory and is squeezing Palestinians into shrinking wedges of land.”
Journalists, medics targeted
As reported by Common Dreams, an early morning IDF strike on April 7 on a tent, where journalists were sleeping outside the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, killed Palestinian Today reporter Hilmi al-Faqaawi and another man, Yousef al-Khazindar. They were burned alive as helpless witnesses were unable to douse the flames or rescue the victims.
More than 230 journalists have been killed by the IDF since October 2023.
Israel is attacking whatever aid gets through and targeting frontline workers, such as the 13 emergency workers (including eight paramedics) massacred in southern Gaza on March 13.
The “Gazafication” of the West Bank has also been stepped up by IDF, joined by armed Israeli settlers, in raiding, bombing and bulldozing Palestinian areas, with the same openly declared aim to drive all Palestinians out.
Trump supports Israeli annexation of the West Bank, using the Biblical terms of Judea and Samaria to describe the region.
Meanwhile, 14-year-old Palestinian American Amer Rabee was killed while visiting family in the West Bank, when he was shot 11 times by IDF soldiers. Two of his friends were also shot. Demands by his family and supporters for the US government to investigate his killing have gone unheeded.
Lebanon, Syria
Israel has also stepped up its military incursions into parts of Lebanon and Syria.
Israel regularly bombs the Lebanese capital, Beirut, especially the Shia areas.
Hezbollah represents Shias in the government, and its armed group fought Israel in the West Bank, in solidarity with Gaza. Israel invaded Lebanon to fight Hezbollah, and still occupies the southern part of Lebanon with the intention of possibly incorporating part of it into Israel.
Israel recently bombed Syrian military bases under the new government’s tenuous hold, to weaken Syria. Israel has for some time incorporated what was part of Syria on its border, and has now extended that area.
Israel’s laws say that all of “Biblical Israel” is its rightful land. While this is a vague description, it includes the West Bank, Gaza and potentially Lebanon, Syria and parts of Iraq and Jordan.
While Israel is not about to claim all of Lebanon and Syria and thereby incorporate many Muslims and others into Israel (and doesn’t have the military forces to do so), it will keep its toeholds and work to dominate both countries.
Resistance continues
Israel’s intensified war in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon does not mean the resistance has been defeated, however. Hamas in Gaza and other organisations fighting in the West Bank continue, and Hezbollah continues in Lebanon.
In wars against a whole people, fighters who are lost are replaced by new ones, as happened in the resistance against the US invasion of Vietnam.
It is also true that the Palestinians have made clear they are not leaving, and won’t leave.
In the US there is bipartisan support for arming and funding Israel’s genocidal war. The US has also bombed Yemen in reprisal for the Houthi’s attacks on ships supplying Israel in solidarity with Gaza. The bombings have failed to significantly damage the Houthis, however, as even the US media has acknowledged.