The NEW YORK TIMES report transmitted below is well worth reading, principally for the conclusion that must be drawn from it even if Patrick Kingsley does not state it explicitly.
CONCLUSION: All speculation about possible non-Hamas forms of governance for the Gaza Strip after Israel ends the "war" which it declared on October 8 are pointless and delusional. It is virtually certain that Israel will not end its "war" until it has emptied the Gaza Strip of its entire Palestinian population.
As this article makes clear, the northern half of Gaza has already been emptied of the great majority of its population and rendered literally unlivable. Nothing remains for its former residents to return to. Israel has started to repeat the process in the southern half of Gaza, dropping leaflets on Khan Younis, a city of 400,000 before October 7 but now sheltering over a million people, telling them to evacuate for their own safety (Where to?), and has intensified its bombing of the city, where it asserts that the Hamas leadership is now located.
Within a matter of weeks, mass starvation will, as a practical matter, leave no "humanitarian" option other than the "evacuation" of the entire population of the Gaza Strip into Egypt and its resettlement there and elsewhere, which the United States and Europe will then, no doubt, generously offer to facilitate and finance.
As I have written before, since there will always be resistance so long as there is occupation, there are only two alternative ways by which Israel could achieve its publicly proclaimed and evidently sincere goal, explicitly supported by the United States, of permanently extinguishing any future possibility of violent resistance to its occupation emanating from the Gaza Strip: (1) comply with international law and relevant UN resolutions by ending its illegal 56-year-long occupation or (2) exterminate or expel the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip.
No Israeli government has ever had any interest in the first alternative. Prominent members of the current Israeli government have not been shy about publicly supporting the second alternative. Everything which the Israeli government has done since October 7 is consistent with the pursuit of that second alternative, which Israel has the capacity and apparently the will to implement, and, with the U.S. government being comfortable in its long-running role as an effective wholly-owned subsidiary of the State of Israel and with European governments being comfortable in their long-running domination by the Israeli-American Empire, who has both the capacity and the will to stop Israel from doing so?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/world/middleeast/northern-gaza-israel-hamas-war-ruins-html
Gaza City Dispatch
A Journey Into Northern Gaza: Ruins, Wreckage and Darkness
New York Times journalists traveled with an Israeli military convoy to catch a rare glimpse of conditions inside wartime Gaza. They saw houses flattened like playing cards, and a city utterly disfigured.
Photographs by Daniel Berehulak
Patrick Kingsley and Daniel Berehulak traveled with an Israeli military convoy to see the devastation inside Gaza City.
- Nov.
17, 2023
When a group of international journalists arrived at the southern fringe of Gaza City early Friday morning, riding in the back of an Israeli army jeep, we struggled to orient ourselves amid the ruins, the wreckage and the darkness.
Since leaving Israel less than an hour earlier, our jeep had bumped and lurched through a landscape so disfigured by 42 days of airstrikes and nearly three weeks of ground warfare that it was hard at times to understand where we were. House after house was missing a wall or a roof, or both. Many had simply been flattened, their concrete floors lying atop each other like a pack of playing cards.
Trying to situate myself after reaching Gaza City, I asked a senior Israeli commander where we were in relation to a fishing port where I usually stayed during visits to Gaza before the war.
“Three hundred meters north,” the commander said.
I was stunned. Without realizing it, we had arrived at the Gazan neighborhood that I knew best.
Across roughly a dozen visits over the past three years, I had often jogged up and down this stretch of the Mediterranean shoreline, along the coastal road, past a fish market, a mosque, a cluster of apartment blocks and several beach clubs and cafes.
Now, it was barely recognizable. I could not find the fish market. The apartment blocks, I now realized, had been wrecked by shelling or strikes. The road had vanished, churned into a sandy, rutted track by the hundreds of Israeli tanks and armored vehicles that have fanned out across the territory since Israel invaded in late October.
To Palestinians and many international observers, such widespread damage to residential and commercial areas illustrates the indiscriminate nature of Israel’s strikes on Gaza, which have killed about 12,000 people and damaged more than 40,000 homes, according to Gazan officials.
The commanders escorting us called it the unavoidable cost of fighting an urban battle against an enemy — Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that controlled all of Gaza until the Israeli invasion — that had embedded itself within civilian buildings and infrastructure.
“We were shot from every direction,” said Lt. Col. Tom Perets, the deputy commander of the brigade that now controls the neighborhood. “We had to respond,” he added.
Israel’s invasion was itself born from necessity, Colonel Perets said. Israel disbanded its settlements in Gaza in 2005, later enforcing a blockade on the territory after Hamas seized control of it in 2007.
He said the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, which Israeli officials say killed an estimated 1,200 people and saw about 240 abducted to Gaza, had left Israel no choice but to re-invade the territory.
Our journey had begun shortly after midnight on Friday morning at Be’eri, an Israeli village that suffered some of the worst brutality of the Hamas attack, and whose residents have since been displaced across the country. Bullet holes fired by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7 were still visible at the village entrance.
To secure places in the convoy, we were obliged to remain with Israeli troops for the duration of our four-hour visit, and agreed not to photograph either the inside of one of the vehicles in which we traveled or the faces of most soldiers. We also agreed to switch off the cellular connections on our phones, once in Gaza, to avoid giving away our locations.
The Times agreed to such conditions in order to catch a rare glimpse of life inside wartime Gaza. Reporting in the territory has otherwise become extremely difficult because Israel and Egypt have blocked independent access to the territory; Hamas restricts journalists in Gaza; and regular network outages are increasingly preventing communication with the outside world.
The convoy crossed into Gaza through a gap in the same fence that Hamas gunmen had penetrated to enter Israel over a month ago.
At a spot just before the border, groups of civilian well-wishers offered sandwiches and drinks to the convoy’s drivers, then cheered them as they continued on down a farm track toward the border.
Entering Gaza meant entering darkness.
Fuel has run out in most parts of the territory, after Israel shut off electricity and blocked the import of fuel, forcing Gaza’s power plant to shut down.
In village after village, the houses that remained intact had no lights shining from within.
That left only light from the stars, as well as the occasional flare fired into the sky by Israeli soldiers to help illuminate battlefields.
The only signs of roadside life were the silhouettes of Israeli infantrymen who guarded the route at strategic intervals.
We saw no Palestinians.
More than a million have fled their homes in the northern half of Gaza, emptying whole neighborhoods. The few left behind risk being disconnected from any kind of support network.
Wide swaths of northern Gaza have been damaged
Sources: Damage analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University; satellite image from Copernicus
“Not everyone can evacuate — my mum is sick and cannot walk, I cannot leave her alone,” said Ahmed Khaled, 39, a civil servant who has stayed in the north and who spoke to my colleague by phone on Thursday.
“Ambulances don’t make it here,” Mr. Khaled said. “Sometimes it takes them two days to arrive and sometimes they just don’t arrive. If they are needed at nights, there’s no way they come.”
Arriving in Gaza City, we left the open-sided jeep for an armored personnel carrier — a sign that pockets of resistance to Israel remain there.
A few minutes later, we arrived at Gaza’s largest hospital — a sprawling campus, partly captured by Israel on Wednesday, that is now filled with the tents of people displaced by the fighting.
The hospital, Al-Shifa, has been a primary target of the Israeli invasion because Israel says it sits atop an underground military compound used by Hamas.
It was therefore the final destination of our journey: Israel is seeking to build international legitimacy for its invasion by proving to journalists that the hospital truly doubles as a military compound — a claim dismissed by Hamas and the hospital leadership.
Inside, we found a squad of Israeli soldiers sleeping in a cafeteria-turned-makeshift-dormitory. A few dozen yards away, a few lights glimmered from the windows of the hospital itself — proof, the Israelis said, that the hospital continued to function despite their presence.
But we were not allowed to switch on our phones to call the hospital management, and the state of the hospital could not be confirmed. The World Health Organization said this week that Al-Shifa had ceased to function as a hospital, and doctors interviewed by Al-Jazeera, a Qatari news channel, said this week that conditions had markedly worsened.
Seeking to justify their presence at the hospital, the soldiers took us to see a stone-and-concrete shaft on its grounds with a staircase descending into the earth — evidence, Israeli officials said, of a Hamas military facility under the hospital.
But Col. Elad Tsury, commander of Israel’s Seventh Brigade, said that Israeli forces, fearing booby traps, had not ventured down the shaft. He said it had been discovered on Thursday afternoon under a pile of sand on the northern perimeter of the complex.
In the darkness, it was unclear where the shaft led or how deep it went, although the military said it had sent a drone down at least several meters. Electrical wiring was visible inside, along with the metal staircase.
When we left, half an hour later, the shaft’s purpose remained unresolved.
So, too, was the fighting nearby.
As we squeezed back into the personnel carrier, gunfire continued to rattle from the neighboring streets.
Patrick
Kingsley is the
Jerusalem bureau chief, covering
Israel and the occupied territories.
He has reported from more than 40
countries, written two books and
previously covered migration and the
Middle East for The Guardian.
Daniel
Berehulak is a
photographer correspondent currently
covering the war in Ukraine. A
longtime contributor to The Times, he
joined the staff in 2022 and lives in
Mexico City.
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