Which meant making Gaza unlivable.
What was hidden and denied (and contrary claims ridiculed, right here on DU!) is now shamelessly bragged about:
Just this week, Netanyahu made this link between the destruction of civilian buildings and forced displacement more explicit. “We are destroying more and more homes — they have nowhere to return to,” he reportedly said at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee. “The only expected result will be a desire for Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip.”
But the intentional and pre-meditated destruction has been happening since the early months of the war.
According to +972 and Local Call’s investigation, this was driven by a conscious, strategic decision to “flatten the area,” to ensure that “the return of people to these spaces is not something that will happen,” as Yotam, who served as a deputy company commander in an armored brigade in Gaza, said.
Non-operational” destruction, devoid of a direct military justification, began within the first months of the war: As early as January 2024, the Israeli investigative outlet The Hottest Place in Hell reported that the army had carried out the “systematic and complete destruction of all buildings near the fence within a kilometer into the Strip, without them being identified as terrorist infrastructure — neither by intelligence nor by soldiers on the ground,” with the goal of creating a “security buffer zone.”
The report quoted soldiers who said that in areas near the border fence such as Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia, and the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in the northern part of the Strip, as well as in Khirbet Khuza’a on the outskirts of Khan Younis, between 75 and 100 percent of the buildings had been destroyed by that time, almost indiscriminately. But what began in Gaza’s perpheries soon became a widely deployed method throughout the Strip, tied to Israel’s broader plan to make much of Gaza unlivable for Palestinians.
Much more at the link. It's an eye-opener.
Some of us have been saying this for well over a year, to be met with eye-rolls and ridicule. Or worse. Go ahead, read it.
https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-total-urban-destruction/
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