For a brief moment, it seemed attention had shifted away from the devastation of Gaza. Conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militant organization Hezbollah had triggered escalations and a new Israeli campaign north of its border — leading to hundreds of
Lebanese civilian casualties in the space of days, the apparent shooting of U.N. peacekeepers by Israeli forces and scenes of destruction not dissimilar to what we’ve seen in Gaza taking place in towns across southern Lebanon. Meanwhile, an Iranian missile barrage on Israeli targets left open the prospect of an Israeli retaliation on Iranian oil and even nuclear sites that could spark broader havoc in the Middle East.
But the events of recent days offer a reminder of the enduring calamity that is ground zero in the region’s turmoil. Northern Gaza, already pummeled by a year of ruinous war, is in the grips of a punishing new Israeli offensive. Israeli forces encircled the battered Jabalya refugee camp in a bid to “systematically dismantle terrorist infrastructure,” according to an IDF statement. Israel issued evacuation orders to some 400,000 remaining residents in northern Gaza, telling them to go to areas farther south that are already teeming with the displaced and still hit by Israeli bombardments. Airstrikes have killed dozens.
Aid workers described a catastrophic scene. “It is like hell to be honest,” Fares Afana, the head of ambulance services in northern Gaza, told The Washington Post in a voice note on Sunday. Israeli forces were attacking the Jabalya refugee camp “for the third time and its surroundings in Beit Lahya and Beit Hanoun,” Afana said, and the camp was surrounded “from all sides.”
Humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders said Friday that thousands of people — including five of its staffers — were trapped in the Jabalya camp. “Nobody is allowed to get in or out — anyone who tries is getting shot,” Sarah Vuylsteke, a project coordinator for the organization, said in a news release.
The intensifying siege will “continue as long as required in order to achieve its objectives,” the IDF said in a statement. It comes alongside an apparent blockade. Israel steadily thinned the aid reaching northern Gaza from August to September. No food trucks have entered at all in October.
Such a tactic may fuel further accusations that Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza. “I don’t really understand what is the strategic goal regarding the north,” Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli intelligence official, told my colleagues, adding that if residents of northern Gaza choose not to leave — and many may not, given the widespread conviction that nowhere in Gaza is actually safe — “they will starve to death.”
The United Nations warned in a briefing Friday that “critical lifelines” into northern Gaza had been cut off by Israel. In some instances, overwhelmed hospitals were ordered to evacuate patients, including babies in neonatal care. A U.N. report last week outlined a “concerted policy” by Israel to “destroy Gaza’s health care system” as part of its war against Hamas, which carried out the brazen Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel.
“It is clear that there is a new plan to forcibly displace people from the north of Gaza by evacuating the entire health system,” said Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, to my colleagues.
Many officials in the military establishment want the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, shown here speaking at a news conference in 2021, to more clearly put forward a strategic plan for the resolution of the conflict that would have intensified pressure on Hamas and won the goodwill of Israel’s neighbors. (Jackie Sanders/Department of Defense)
Georgios Petropoulos, head of the Gaza office at the U.N. agency for humanitarian affairs, described to my colleagues failed attempts last week by a U.N. convoy to reach hospitals in northern Gaza and retrieve patients there. “We need the Israeli military to understand that whatever it is they are going to be doing long term here, humanitarian workers need to get in there and do their work parallel to that,” Petropoulos said.
In Israeli media, reports over the weekend suggested a new phase of the war may be underway, as hopes for a cease-fire and a deal to release the remaining hostages in Hamas captivity wane. It accompanies internal frustrations among some figures in the military establishment, who wanted the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to more clearly put forward a strategic plan for the resolution of the conflict that would have intensified pressure on Hamas and won the goodwill of Israel’s neighbors.
In its absence, and given Hamas’s ability to endure among the ruins of Gaza, some prominent voices have called for extreme measures. In fact, some elements of one mooted strategy — dubbed the “Generals’ plan” in Israeli media after a group of retired officers floated this proposal — may be in play right now, judging by the concerns raised by humanitarian groups in northern Gaza.
“It is possible that the operation is laying the groundwork for a decision by the government to put into effect the so-called surrender or starve plan of Maj. Gen. (ret.) Giora Eiland,” noted Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Sunday. “That plan calls for all the residents of northern Gaza to be evacuated to humanitarian zones in the south, with those choosing to remain deemed Hamas operatives and legitimate military targets. While Gazans in the south are getting humanitarian assistance, those who remain in the north will face hunger.”
This, as Haaretz added, is an obvious war crime and there’s no official Israeli statement endorsing such policies. “One official with knowledge of the matter said parts of the plan are already being implemented, without specifying which parts,” reported the Associated Press. “A second official, who is Israeli, said Netanyahu ‘had read and studied’ the plan, ‘like many plans that have reached him throughout the war,’ but did not say whether any of it had been adopted.”
Eiland, who has been vocal in Israeli media and is critical of Netanyahu’s initial approach to the war, has openly discussed what he believes should happen next. In a recent interview, he said the 400,000 residents in northern Gaza need to be given a window to leave and, after that, “all this area will become … a military zone.” The Palestinians who remain, he said, “whether some of them are fighters, some of them are civilians … will have two choices either to surrender or to starve.”
From Eiland’s perspective, the goal should be to make the pressure on Hamas unbearable, so that its military apparatus collapses and the remaining hostages are freed. But for far-right allies of Netanyahu, the obliteration of Gazan neighborhoods and indefinite military rule could be a prelude to new waves of annexation. “Our heroic fighters and soldiers are destroying the evil of Hamas, and we will occupy the Gaza Strip,” said Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich earlier this year. “To tell the truth, where there is no settlement, there is no security.”
Smotrich reportedly reiterated these calls for annexation and settlement at a top-level meeting last week.
Israel’s growing body of critics in the West fear Smotrich’s once-fringe vision becoming a reality. “An entire population is being encircled and forced out, with nowhere for them to go,” said Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin in a statement Sunday. “This represents the mass expulsion of people from their homeland.”
