Hebrew Newspaper|| The massive devastation in Gaza is The Strategy

By Yoana Gonen

“According to the statistics of the Gaza Ministry of Health, which are largely accepted by the Israeli security establishment, more than 30,000 Gazans have been killed in the war so far... The number of wounded has reached more than 70,000. This is the number recognized by Gaza’s hospitals and clinics... Added to those who were displaced from Gaza... Assuming that there are 1.8 million people in Gaza, Israel struck and removed about 8 percent of the population of the Gaza Strip from working against it. This percentage is enormous... As for housing, tens of thousands of apartments were bombed in The Gaza Strip, in addition to the massive destruction of the road, sewage, water, and electricity networks. All of these elements lead to a state of emissions, which will take a long time to repair. 

The pressure on these displaced people also increases as their hunger increases. In other words, the Gaza Strip now has More people are displaced and killed than what happened in the original Nakba in 1948. The Israeli army is systematically destroying the Gaza Strip.”

The above-mentioned paragraph did not appear in an article written by [leftist writer] Amira Hass in the Haaretz newspaper, but rather in a post published by court journalist Shimon Riklin, literally, on the X platform (Twitter), on Saturday evening. The man’s goal in writing these lines, God forbid, was not to express his sympathy for the tens of thousands of dead, displaced, and people exposed to starvation. Rather, his goal was to brag about these facts, and to respond to the talk that speaks of “hesitation, and Israel’s inability to decide on the issue of Gaza,” according to his words, Riklin pointed out, with pride, that Israel was truly able to achieve miraculous achievements in the field of ethnic cleansing and systematic extermination of Gaza.

For several weeks, senior politicians in the United States and Europe have been warning Israel against harming innocent people on a large scale, and about the worsening humanitarian catastrophe in the Strip. They do not realize that detailed documentation of the suffering in Gaza constitutes a list of achievements in the eyes of people like Riklin, who now sit in power. We are not talking here only about the radical right: the belief that “there are no innocents in Gaza” and the call for unjust revenge have spread among wide sectors of the Israeli public.

It can be noted that Riklin, at least, did not try to deny the facts, and that he does not belong to the category of those who “starve the Gazans and cry over them,” those who feel a little discomfort when they see the terrifying scenes of starving infants in the Strip, but they calm down. They terrified themselves, arguing that the children of Gaza brought these calamities on themselves, and that Israel bears no responsibility for what is happening.

It is estimated that about 70 percent of the dead in Gaza are women and children, but Riklin does not distinguish between a one-month-old infant and an armed Hamas member. He is proud of each of the 30,000 bodies, and he is also proud of the collapse of the health system, thirst and starvation, the destruction of the sewage network, and the mass flight of people. His tweet, besides giving us a disturbing glimpse into his dark soul, is also evidence that the massive and continuing devastation in Gaza is not merely a byproduct of a strategy, but that this devastation is the strategy itself.

It is no coincidence that the crazy right considers the most difficult hours the country is going through to be a period of euphoria and exaltation: “It is an amazing time,” as [pro-Netanyahu right-wing journalist] Yanon Magiel described it in an interview he conducted with [broadcaster] Ronnie Cuban about two weeks ago.

This indifference to morality, and this overwhelming desire for revenge, are exploited by the fundamentalists who live among us, in order to achieve their real goal, which Riklin specified without hesitation: “cleansing” the Gaza Strip of its population, whether by iron and fire, or due to the lack of options, or by the sword or due to the spread of epidemics.

What the natural world sees as a horrific disaster, many in Israel consider an achievement. As their achievements accumulate, the entire Israeli society will slide into the abyss.