Sanitize Then Destroy: Israel's Watershed Moment in the Takeover of Gaza City - Haaretz Today - Haaretz.com
In over 22 months of war, few moments have symbolized a watershed for Israel quite like the impending takeover of Gaza City.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his top ministers and generals to finalize the IDF plan to capture and occupy Gaza City, amid fierce internal opposition and with freed hostages and families of those still held in Gaza literally begging the prime minister to pursue even an imperfect, limited cease-fire deal that Hamas has said it is prepared to back.
On Wednesday evening, as the army announced that the expanded Gaza offensive had begun, Israel's Defense Minister Israel Katz, tasked with overseeing its implementation, found time to host in his office some of the most extreme Religious Zionist rabbis, mostly West Bank settlers.
Israeli military vehicles are positioned along the border with the Gaza Strip on August 21, 2025.Credit: AFP/JACK GUEZ
He reportedly vowed to them that after the offensive, "Gaza City will look like Beit Hanoun." Touring Beit Hanoun, on the Gaza Strip's northeastern tip, just weeks ago, Haaretz's Yaniv Kubovich described Israeli bulldozers demolishing the few buildings that remain there, with the city "lying flattened," most of its structures now "completely destroyed."
While Netanyahu claims that Gaza City is Hamas' final stronghold and that this one last offensive would free Gaza from the "Hamas Nazis," some 1.2 million Palestinians are now living in the city – about 700,000 who lived there before the war and another half a million displaced from the rest of Gaza.
Haaretz reported last week that the IDF said it is prepared to use artillery in "nearby areas" to encourage residents to leave. So when the IDF ever-so-altruistically frames this as "evacuating the population for its safety," the reality is a forced, mass transfer and concentration of more than a million Palestinians.
They, in turn, will be left with no home to return to, as Israel's defense minister revealed to the rabbis. In doing so, he made clear that the goal, policy, and means of Israel's Gaza City offensive is not freedom for Gazans, but total destruction.
Palestinians wait to receive food from a charity kitchen, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, August 21, 2025.Credit: Hatem Khaled/ REUTERS
"Some people would rather die than be uprooted from Gaza. They literally prefer to be killed on this land than to see our city turned into nothing but a memory," Walid, a 26-year-old Palestinian from Gaza City, told Haaretz's Nagham Zbeedat this week. Israel, for its part, appears compelled to deliver Walid's fears.
This sanitation of the language of expulsion, with Israelis already tuned out to or disbelieving of the humanitarian crisis created by Israel in Gaza, marks a turning point. The government can openly declare its intent to commit war crimes and face little public scrutiny, apart from the toll on weary reservists and fears for the fate of Israeli hostages.
To answer this, Netanyahu made another announcement on Thursday: That he had given instructions to begin talks for the release of all the hostages and an end to the war, "on terms acceptable to Israel." Saying these words upon his arrival at the meeting to approve the IDF's plans, he attempted to assuage the public's hesitation: "These two things go hand in hand."
These 685 days of war have brought massacres on both sides, the execution of hostages, repeated violations of cease-fires, and the deliberate use of starvation. The current offensive to forcefully expel 1.2 million Palestinians from Gaza City will join this catastrophic list.
People attend a demonstration organised by families and friends of Israelis held hostage by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip since 2023, calling for action to secure their release in Tel Aviv, last week.Credit: AFP/GIL COHEN-MAGEN
Israel will cement its choice to destroy when it could begin to rebuild, to prolong the war again and reduce what remains of Gaza to rubble, rather than end the fighting, free the hostages, and begin 'de-Hamasifying' the enclave with international partners willing to help.
The moment this offensive begins – though if you listen to defense officials, it already has – must be a moment Israelis look back on and confront as one when their country chose to entrench the tragic fate of two peoples even deeper, and ask what they could have known, or done, to resist it.