The Killing Zones

The goal of Netanyahu and his accomplices is clear: to shoot and starve as many civilians as they can before compelling those who survive to leave Gaza with a gun to their heads. Israeli forces are now using food supplies as bait to lure Palestinians into their killing zones. Massacres at distribution centers are not an unfortunate by-product of Israel’s scheme — they are its intended and predictable outcome.

Last month, the executive director of the self-styled Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), Jake Wood, resigned from his post because he deemed it impossible to work with the Israeli army in Gaza “while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.” We can safely infer that Wood, a US military veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, anticipated what was going to happen over the weeks to come and did not want to suffer the reputational damage that would inevitably follow — or expose himself to the risk of criminal prosecution.

Israel has justified its plan to exclude all the legitimate humanitarian groups from Gaza and put the GHF in charge of food supplies by lying shamelessly about what has been happening on the ground. Aid organizations have repeatedly stressed that there is no evidence of Hamas stealing food aid in Gaza, contrary to Israeli claims. When there have been instances of looting, the guilty parties are criminal gangs operating with the full support of the Israeli army.

Last November, the Washington Post summarized the evidence of Israeli complicity with the gangs. The Post reporters quoted from a United Nations memo that described a pattern of “passive if not active benevolence,” with one gang leader allowed to establish a military-style compound in an area that was “restricted, controlled and patrolled by the [Israel Defense Forces].”

The looters typically moved in to ransack trucks near the crossing point at Kerem Shalom, while Israeli soldiers watched them set about their work. One UN official, Georgios Petropoulos, said that he had directly confronted the Israeli authorities about what was happening: “What is that meant to make us think if the only place in Gaza where an armed Palestinian can come within 150 meters of a tank and not get shot is there?”

The Post article identified Yasser Abu Shabab as the most important gang leader operating in Gaza. The full extent of Israeli assistance to Abu Shabab and his associates became clear in the past few weeks after an Israeli opposition politician, Avigdor Lieberman, accused Netanyahu of arming the gangs. Instead of issuing a boilerplate denial, or even a non-denial denial, the Israeli prime minister offered a full public confession on his social media account: “What’s wrong with that? It’s only good. It saves the lives of Israeli soldiers.”

Abu Shabab is a drug trafficker whose organization includes men who worked with the Sinai franchise of ISIS across the Egyptian border. After a barrage of Israeli propaganda pushing the line “HAMAS = ISIS,” it now seems as if Netanyahu’s government is happy to supply guns to men who actually do have ties to ISIS. According to Israeli media reports, there have even been drone strikes called in to protect members of Abu Shabab’s gang from Hamas.

Islands of Misery

Shortly before the Israeli attack on Iran, the BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen published an article that presented overwhelming evidence of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. He concluded it with the following words:

Those who have been into Gaza with the UN or medical teams say that even people who have seen many wars find it hard to grasp the extent of the damage; so many islands of human misery in an ocean of rubble. I keep thinking about something an Israeli officer said the only time I’ve been into Gaza since the war started. I spent a few hours in the ruins with the Israeli army, one month into the war, when it had already made northern Gaza into a wasteland. He started telling me how they did their best to not to fire on Palestinian civilians. Then he trailed off, and paused, and told me no-one in Gaza could be innocent because they all supported Hamas.

Less than a week after the October 7 attack, the Israeli president Isaac Herzog made a very similar remark in an interview with another British broadcaster, ITV:

It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians [being] not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza.

Herzog’s claim that Israel was operating in Gaza “according to rules of international law” was transparent window-dressing for the key argument he wanted to make: there were no civilians in Gaza, and no limitations on what the Israeli army could do. The Israeli officer with whom Bowen spoke clearly understood what Herzog was saying, along with all the other officers who have turned Gaza into a free-fire zone.

Bowen could have published his indictment of Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza many months ago. If his superiors at the BBC finally gave him the green light to do so at this late hour, it was not because any new evidence came to light but rather because the rhetoric of the British government has shifted. If a Russian army officer told a BBC journalist that there were no innocent civilians in Ukraine, it would have featured in every single report from that point onward. The failure of the BBC and other media outlets to report accurately and appropriately on Israel’s crimes in Gaza is a case of professional malpractice that reveals their subservience to power.

Western support for Israel comes in different rhetorical flavors, from the bloodthirsty ramblings of Mike Huckabee to the robotic mantras of European politicians like Keir Starmer and Ursula von der Leyen, who repeat the same stock phrases about “Israel’s right to defend itself” as it launches another aggressive war. They all share responsibility for one of the defining atrocities of our age.