Israel wants to destroy evidence of its war crimes and prepare the ground for the expulsion of Palestinians.
If you read the Western press this morning, you may come to believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to take military control over Gaza is new. But dropping 2000lb bombs does not rescue captives and wiping out whole neighbourhoods does not come without plans to build something in their place.
On Friday, Israel’s security cabinet approved the occupation of Gaza City, formalising what was always the endgame of this genocide. The plan follows a deliberate sequence: First destroy, then starve, occupy, demand demilitarisation, and finally carry out full ethnic cleansing once Palestinians have no political power and capacity to resist. This is how the dream of “Greater Israel” is achieved.
But why formalise this occupation now, after 22 months of systematic slaughter? Because the crime scene must be sanitised before the world sees what remains of Gaza.
On Sunday, the Israeli army assassinated media journalists Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa by dropping a missile on a media tent near al-Shifa Hospital. Their names are now added to the long list of more than 230 Palestinian journalists and media workers that Israel has killed since October 2023.
With Israel banning all foreign media from freely accessing Gaza, Palestinian journalists have been solely responsible for covering and documenting Israeli war crimes. The assassination is a clear message to them to stop, to stay silent.
Meanwhile, foreign journalists who rode on airdrop flights to Gaza were also warned. Aerial footage they released offered glimpses of Gaza’s corpse: A patchwork of shattered concrete, ruins and hollowed streets. It is complete desolation.
The footage shocked viewers across the world and so the Israeli government was quick to ban filming on these flights, warning that aid drops would be halted if there were any violations.
Israel knows it cannot continue to block foreign media access to Gaza forever. The genocide will come to an end eventually; aid convoys and relief workers will be allowed in and with them, foreign journalists with cameras.
The official death toll in Gaza stands at 60,000, a number that by many expert accounts is an undercount. According to estimates, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have likely been murdered. As UN experts declared on August 7, “Israel is exterminating the people of Gaza by any and all means.” There are a lot of crimes to cover up.
We have already seen the modus operandi of the Israeli army in trying to destroy evidence in Gaza. It has buried massacred civilians in mass graves with bulldozers; it has withheld bodies of Palestinian torture victims; it has dug into the sand whole crime scenes of execution; it has planted weapons in hospitals that it has ransacked; it has lied about discovering tunnels.
All of this fits neatly with Israel’s long history of burying evidence of atrocities. Since 1948, Israeli authorities have systematically erased their ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by building on top of the ruins of pillaged Palestinian villages and towns.
Israeli intelligence has also removed documents from archives that provide evidence of Zionist and Israeli forces committing war crimes during the Nakba of 1948. Some of the documents that have disappeared give gruesome details about the brutality of Zionist fighters during massacres of Palestinians, like in the village of Dawaymeh, near Hebron, where hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children were killed by artillery fire or directly executed. In 1955, the settlement of Amatzia was built on the ruins of the Palestinian village.
By occupying the northern part of the Gaza Strip now, Israel will certainly resort to these same methods of erasure and falsification. It will also be able to control foreign media coverage, just as it has done until now.
The Israeli army has only allowed foreign journalists into Gaza embedded with its military units under strict conditions that transform reporters into participants in hasbara. Embedded journalists must submit all materials for military review before publication, must operate under constant observation, and cannot speak freely with Palestinians.
Journalists thus become mouthpieces for the Israeli military, parroting their justifications for wholesale destruction and propagating their lies about Palestinian civilians as “human shields” and Gaza hospitals and schools as “terror hubs”.
The response of the international community to Israel’s plan has been just more condemnations. Germany went as far as halting military exports that could be used in Gaza – something that should have been done 22 months ago, when Israel started indiscriminately bombing civilians.
These actions are pathetic. They do not absolve these governments of their complicity in aiding and abetting the crime of genocide; they are just another sign of their moral cowardice.
The international community must take decisive action. It must undertake military intervention, as mandated under international law, to force Israel to immediately end the violence, to allow unrestricted humanitarian aid into Gaza, and to give Palestinians the freedom they are entitled to. International journalists must be granted immediate access to collect whatever evidence remains of Israel’s crimes before it disappears under the cover of “military operations”.
It is time the world starts believing Palestinians. For 22 months, Palestinians have said this is genocide. They have said it while stuck under the rubble, while starving, while carrying their children’s bodies. They said Israel was not defending itself but trying to erase Palestinians. They said occupation and ethnic cleansing are the goal. Israeli politicians themselves have said it.
Without urgent international action, the words “never again” will refer not to the prevention of genocide, but to the existence of Palestinian life in Gaza. The truth so many Palestinians have died to tell must not be buried with their bodies.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect media’s editorial stance.
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