Israel’s Third Phase is a Redoubling of Genocide

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Less than a month ago, I wrote that Israel’s strategy is genocide. Now Israel apparently recognizes that it is losing the ground war to Hamas and allied groups in the Palestinian resistance. Israel is casualty-averse, and it is taking a lot more casualties in Gaza than it can accept. In fact, Israel refuses to disclose more than a fraction of its casualties, and their strict military censorship won’t let others disclose such information, either.

The resistance, on the other hand, is showing the same brilliant preparations for a prolonged battle that it showed on October 7, 2023, in overcoming Israel’s vaunted military technology, strategy and capability. The Internet is full of Go-Pro videos filmed by impeccably trained and apparently fearless resistance fighters, blasting Israeli troops and equipment even in the north of Gaza, which Israel supposedly leveled to the ground and from which it drove out most of the population. Israel wants to blow up the tunnels, too, but the resistance welcomes the attempt, trying to lure them into the traps set for them.

The Israeli public, in the meantime, is impatient with the lack of progress – in freeing the captives/hostages, in winning the ground war, and with both the lack of transparency and the unaccustomed sacrifices. In the last month, the flight abroad by Israelis has doubled from 250,000 to more than 500,000. Prime Minister Netanyahu is the most unpopular person in Israel, and crowds of his constituency are confronting him at public events to make any deal that brings the captives/hostages home.

He’s trying to make a deal, but his hand is weak, and the Hamas government is driving a hard bargain, saying that they won’t even negotiate unless and until all fighting stops. Netanyahu can’t do that. If he tries, he will lose his uncompromising and racist partners in the governing coalition, and if he is no longer Prime Minister, he will be subject to prosecution and imprisonment for corruption. Hamas knows how to put him in a corner.

As a result, Israel is planning to withdrew most of its ground troops from Gaza, a tacit admission that Hamas forces have won the ground battle. Israeli media describe this as the beginning of the “third phase”, which will include a buffer zone on the border of the Gaza Strip, and (what else?) more intensive bombing than ever before.

The third phase of what? Surely not a war. Israel is abandoning the only fighting that resembles a war, i.e. combat. The Israeli leadership has said that it wants to eliminate Hamas, but their “third phase” strategy seems to disengage from Hamas, and eliminate instead the entire Palestinian population – women, children and all. The correct name for this is genocide.

Nevertheless, this is clearly Israel’s strategy. Is it achievable? With enough US bombs, rockets and other airborne munitions supplied by the U.S., why not? It’s not as if unarmed civilians are capable of fighting back against such an onslaught from the air. So yes, with the complicity and underwriting of the US, they are realistically capable of committing a thorough genocide.

In fact, beyond a certain point, Israel doesn’t need bombs and missiles except to hasten the end of more than 2 million lives. The buffer zone alone can be the killer, by denying food, water, shelter, medical supplies and services, as well as everything else necessary to sustain life. Israel has already informed Egypt and other countries that it intends to re-occupy the “Philadelphi corridor,” a strip of land several hundred meters wide and fourteen kilometers long, that Israel bulldozed through the city of Rafah and to the Mediterranean along the border of Egypt in 2003-4, destroying thousands of homes in the process and killing American nonviolent resistor Rachel Corrie, who was trying to block them. Among other interdictions, the buffer zone will presumably also be used to stop communication with the outside world, as well, by jamming and other measures, so that the scenes of living skeletons and their faint cries for help will be blocked from the eyes of the world until the job is done, perhaps before spring, perhaps sooner.

This, or something very like it, appears to be the plan. It assumes that, eventually, the resistance fighters in their underground fortress will also disappear, to be seen never again, along with their Israeli captives. Never again. How ironic that the Zionist Movement, claiming to represent all Jews, should seek to commit the greatest genocide of our time, with unlimited means provided by the country most able to prevent it.

Paul Larudee is a retired academic and current administrator of a nonprofit human rights and humanitarian aid organization.