The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued evacuation orders on Thursday for residents of 14 areas in northern Gaza, telling residents to move south.
The IDF is already in control of about half the Gaza Strip, and troops, including newly drafted reserve brigades, continue to advance across the enclave.
The orders were issued after prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in a news conference on Wednesday night, said that at the end of the war “all areas of the Gaza Strip will be under Israeli security control, and Hamas will be defeated”.
Opposition head Yair Lapid issued a stark warning in response. “The implication of Netanyahu’s statements is the occupation of Gaza for many years,” he said.
More than 350 lawyers and academics say Government not complying with international law obligations over Palestine crisis
Two Israeli embassy staff shot dead near Jewish museum in Washington
Aid trucks enter Gaza after delays as pressure mounts on Israel
Netanyahu’s promise of Israel’s ‘total victory’ over Hamas is likely to remain elusive dream
Referring to Israeli families sending their children to the army for compulsory military service, he said: “Our children in the years ahead will roam about the streets of Khan Younis and Rafah.”
Many areas of Gaza, such as Rafah and Jabaliya, already resemble Dresden after the Allied bombing in the second World War.
A similar fate awaits the relatively few areas where the IDF has failed to deploy to date if the offensive continues in the absence of agreement on a ceasefire.
But the new offensive is essentially more of the same and Netanyahu’s “total victory” is likely to remain an elusive dream.
Hamas is unlikely to surrender or release any more hostages without international guarantees to end the war, opting instead to sustain guerrilla attacks, hoping that the insufferable toll on the local population from the IDF onslaught will eventually force the US to pressure Israel to call it a day.
Over the last week it has become clear that the patience of the international community with Israel is almost at an end.
The truth is the IDF does not have the manpower to sustain a long-term occupation of Gaza.
Burnout after almost 20 months of war has reached unprecedented levels. And Israel does not have the resources to provide essential services for Gaza’s impoverished, war-torn population.
But the Israeli leadership adamantly refuses to discuss a day-after scenario that could offer Israel an exit strategy out of the Gaza quagmire, and it continues to block any arrangement that involves Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority playing a role in postwar reconstruction.
For Netanyahu, continuing the war is the only option to keep his right-wing coalition intact and prevent new elections – and the only option to prevent a state commission of inquiry into the debacle of the October 7th, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel.
The key lies with Donald Trump. The US president may be the only one at this juncture capable of imposing a ceasefire on a recalcitrant Netanyahu.
