Netanyahu Is Pushing Israel's Security Cabinet to Pass His Annihilation Order - Opinion - Haaretz.com
For the first time in Israel's history, the security cabinet is slated to make a decision on annihilation on Thursday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to occupy the Gaza Strip, which clearly no one in the security cabinet will challenge, means confirming the killing of thousands of people, demolishing the living conditions of more than two million walking dead and carrying out the final destruction of a busy, crowded strip of land where people once lived, but will no longer.
If this plan is implemented in full, Thursday will be remembered as the day in which the annihilation order was issued. People may yet learn about this day in history class, just as they learn other dates on which a people's fate was decided. The names of the decision makers will go down in disgrace.
This time, the last remaining masks will be removed. Nobody will take the prattle about destroying Hamas or freeing the hostages seriously any longer. The annihilation order that will be issued on Thursday will be a sentence of destruction, but not for Hamas. The first victims will be the handful of living hostages. And immediately after that, the fate of all the powerless people in Gaza will be sealed.
Rom Braslavski, 21, in footage released last week by the terror group that abducted him, Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
If any Hamas members are left in Gaza, they will be the last to suffer. The Israel Defense Forces hasn't had any military clashes with them in a long time.
When IDF tanks race through the ruins of Gaza City and when planes bomb the rubble of Rafah, the ones who will suffer are the children, the elderly, the women, the sick, the amputees and those with other disabilities who have managed to survive until now. They will have nowhere to shelter from the indiscriminate artillery and drone fire.
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Hamas' fighters, if there are any left, will remain in their hideouts, which the IDF hasn't managed to find in 22 months. It's unlikely that it will manage to do so now. But what difference does it make any longer?
Hamas was defeated militarily, but grew stronger politically. The next round won't change this unequivocal fact. When the poet Yehuda Amichai wrote in "A Song for the Eve of Sabbath" about a war that was never enough, I doubt he ever imagined the extent to which it would never be enough.
The 60,000 people killed in Gaza weren't enough, nor were the 20,000 Gazan children or the 1,000 babies that have been killed or starved to death there.
The roughly 1,000 soldiers who have been killed weren't enough. The suffering of the hostages and their families wasn't enough. The destruction, the starvation and moving hundreds of thousands of desperate people from place to place weren't enough.
Israeli troops deploy with their tanks near the border fence with the Gaza Strip on August 1, 2025. (Photo by Jack GUEZ / AFP)Credit: AFP/JACK GUEZ
They weren't enough for the war, and they weren't enough for its instigators – Netanyahu and his partners, the IDF chief of staff and his officers. Proof of this will be presented in the security cabinet on Thursday.
The army's order of the day will be "Move, move, end." Move, move, until Gaza has been ended as a place where it's possible to live, for at least another generation. And that is how the ethnic cleansing plan will also be implemented.
Thursday's decision will herald a population transfer. The security cabinet that decides on reoccupying Gaza will also be deciding to ethnically cleanse the occupied territory.
This will also be the first such decision in Israeli history. Unlike the ethnic cleansing that occurred during the previous Nakba, in 1948, this time there will be no need to spend years digging through archives to find an explicit order. It will be issued on Thursday, even if indirectly.
Given the living conditions in Gaza, a decision to reoccupy it will confront its residents with a choice between death and expulsion. That's what the government is aiming for, with support from both Washington and a sizable swath of Israelis.
The security cabinet will make the decision to approve it, and the full cabinet will follow suit. The courageous IDF officer who would turn in his rank tabs over the crimes about to befall the army has yet to be born. The media will applaud and cover up the next act in this horror show just as it has the previous ones.
The only question that remains unanswered is what will the world do. Will it continue issuing condemnations and "recognizing" Palestine without lifting a finger to stop this campaign of annihilation? Only the world has the power to stop it. In Israel, nobody will do so. And Netanyahu? He may yet be nostalgic for those happy days when his trial took place in Judge Rivka Friedman-Feldman's courtroom.