🇮🇱 Netanyahu Will Attack Gaza Until Hamas Is Completely Destroyed

Israeli military forces are likely to mount new attacks into parts of Gaza now crowded with hundreds of thousands of displaced people once they have concluded their current offensive into Gaza City ⚔️, a former Israeli national security adviser and general has said.

Yaakov Amidror, who served as national security adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu from 2011 to 2013 after decades in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) 🪖, said that the “hardcore” of Hamas was in Gaza City but that “another chapter” could follow after the offensive there: an attack into the “central camps” area farther south.

“The campaign in Gaza City will be three months of intensive [fighting] then six months to clear it [of Hamas fighters] so there is no threat from there and then we decide about the central camps,” Amidror said.

The “central camps” refers to the heavily built-up Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps in central Gaza 🏘. Both are packed with displaced Palestinians from elsewhere in Gaza, and have been repeatedly subjected to airstrikes 💥.

Aid officials working in Gaza told the Guardian that they had been “warned off” investing substantial resources in new facilities in the central camps area during recent discussions with Israeli military officials.

“Our clear understanding from those conversations was that the IDF would be going in there, though it wasn’t clear if that meant now or after they’re done in Gaza City,” one said.

In August, Netanyahu referred in a press conference to the central camps as a secondary objective of the new offensive 🎯, but gave no further details.

A new major offensive would exacerbate the acute humanitarian crisis in Gaza further ⚠️, reduce even more the fraction of the devastated territory that is available to Gaza’s population and cause many more civilian casualties.

Much of northern Gaza is gripped by famine 🍞, according to internationally respected experts, and malnutrition is widespread elsewhere.

The war was triggered by an attack by Hamas into Israel in October 2023, in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians 💔. Of the 251 people taken hostage, 47 remain in Gaza, including 25 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 65,000 people ⚰️, mostly civilians, injured more than 160,000, and reduced much of the territory to rubble 🏚.

More than 300,000 people have been displaced from Gaza City in the past month, according to UN figures 📊, in the face of the new Israeli offensive, which started last week.

The Jordanian field hospital in the city’s south-western neighbourhood of Tal al-Hawa received orders to evacuate on Monday morning 🚑, according to a senior health official.

The military has already ordered all Palestinians in Gaza City to head south ⬇️, to central and southern Gaza. It has told aid workers in private messages that all humanitarian sites except hospitals must evacuate 🏥.

#netanyahu #hamas #destroyed #gaza

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Palestinian Houses Destroyed To Pave the Way to an Israel Park

🔤🔤🔤🔤➖

At the bottom of a steep and densely populated valley just below Jerusalem’s old city walls, the earth has been shaken in recent weeks by jackhammers and bulldozers.

These have been the sounds of Jerusalem for decades as the Israeli state has relentlessly sought to stamp a uniformly Jewish identity on to the occupied east of the city, while erasing its Palestinian character.

“This is something really hard. This is something bitter,” Jalal al-Tawil said as he watched a tractor he had hired, with a front loader at the front and jackhammer at the back, rip apart the last remnants of the house his father had built, which in turn had been on the site of his grandparents’ home.

By Wednesday morning, most of the walls had been brought down to their foundations and the rubble pushed into a single pile. Al-Tawil left the thick knotty root of a 35-year-old grapevine until last.

“It used to provide grapes for all of al-Bustan,” he said. The spring vine leaves had already sprouted along the trellis above him, but he was resigned to the fact they would never again bear fruit.

The experience of demolishing his own family’s home and history had drained al-Tawil, but it came down to brutal economics. The Jerusalem municipality had told him it would cost him 280,000 shekels (€50,000) if its workers demolished the house. Hiring his own equipment and labour would cost al-Tawil less than a tenth of that.

“Also, if they do it, they will uproot the land and make a complete mess,” he said. For him it was like being given the choice between suicide or being murdered, he said.

More than 57 homes in al-Bustan, part of the larger Silwan district of East Jerusalem, have been demolished in the past two years with at least eight designated for demolition in the next few weeks. On the site a biblical theme park called the Kings Garden is to be built, supposedly where King Solomon took his leisure three millennia ago.

The park is designed to be part of a spreading, largely settler-driven, archaeological project focusing exclusively on Jerusalem’s Jewish past and centred on what has been called the City of David – despite the view of many Israeli archaeologists that the visible remains date to other eras, before and after King David’s iron-age reign.

Aviv Tatarsky, a senior researcher at Ir Amim, a group advocating for an equitably shared Jerusalem, says al-Bustan encapsulates the erasure of Palestinians from both geography and history.

“Israel is not willing to recognise the bi-national, multi-ethnic, multicultural reality of Jerusalem and it is wiping out first and foremost Palestinians – but really anything that is not Jewish, and then glossing it over with this Disneyfied nonsense,” he said.

“If this happens to the end, Israelis will go there and they will see the story of the park and they will be completely ignorant of the fact that lives were destroyed, a whole community was destroyed to make space for it.”

#palestinian #houses #destroyed #irael #park

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

🔤🔤🔤🔤➖

The shadow of the Kings Garden theme park has hung over al-Bustan for nearly two decades, but the bulldozers have been held back until now by Palestinian resistance, combined with international opposition and some ambivalence within Israeli politics.

All three barriers have fallen since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, the ensuing Gaza war and the restoration of Donald Trump as US president.

Ambassadors from other countries still visit and pledge support, but with Washington’s support, their combined intervention has proved ineffectual.

“There are stray dogs who go around the neighbourhood at night who feel more safe and secure than we do,” said Mohammad Qwaider, 60, a father of six. He recently demolished the part of the house which has been a family home for more than half a century, in the hope of appeasing the planners.

This week, however, a man from the municipality came to warn him that the bulldozers would be back to level the rest of it.

Qwaider has chronic back problems, a son with special needs, and an infirm elderly mother who is unable to move, and he argues they have no other options.

“If they demolish our house, we will put up a tent. We will not leave,” he said. “Maybe they misunderstand our mentality as Palestinians. We are not an easy target. You cannot take our land.”

The Jerusalem municipality did not respond to a request for comment on its actions in al-Bustan, but told the +972 news site that the planned theme park was “being constructed for the benefit of all city residents” and al-Bustan’s houses were built illegally.

“This area was never zoned for residential use, and the Jerusalem municipality is now working to build a park in an area that suffers from a severe shortage of open public spaces,” it said.

The municipality also said it had tried “for years to find a solution for the residents that would also include a residential alternative, but they did not express any serious interest in reaching a resolution”.

The municipality has routinely denied building permits to Palestinians in East Jerusalem while routinely approving them for Israeli Jews. Furthermore, Abu Diab argued, the same rules were never applied to unauthorised settler outposts which constantly spring up in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Amina Abu Diab, a schoolteacher and social worker, said her main concern now was for the children she cares for, who were facing a future of homelessness and uncertainty.

“A house is a child’s dream of the future, and if somebody comes to demolish them, they destroy the dreams and a child’s sense of security,” she said.

“And then what do the children think of us? That we cannot protect ourselves and we cannot protect our children.”

#palestinian #houses #destroyed #irael #park

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸