‘To the Point of Uninhabitability’
A few weeks ago the media office of the Gaza government issued a statement declaring that the Israeli Defense Forces now control over 77 percent of the territory in the Gaza Strip, much of it in ruins from the continuing Israeli Air Force attacks on suspected Hamas sites. Many of the known Hamas leadership at the time of its October 7, 2023, surprise attack on Israel have been killed or have fled Gaza. But the organization has survived and now there are as many as 20,000 Hamas members. Young recruits today try to control the delivery of relief food and other goods to Gaza along with the black market that dominates what is left of its economy.
Israel has not won its war against Hamas—a war that at one time was promised to be ended within a span of four or five months. The Israeli leadership responded to that failure by taking the war to the people of Gaza, though Israelis were assured that the terrifying and around-the-clock Israeli air force bombing attacks in Gaza would stop when Hamas was driven from its fortified tunnels.
A few weeks ago the Associated Press reported from Tel Aviv that the areas in Gaza bordering Israel have been razed by the IDF to “the point of uninhabitability.” Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East studies at the Sciences Po in Paris, recently published an account of a trip to Gaza. A revised and updated version of his book Un Historien à Gaza was recently reviewed in Arab Digest:
“Driving along the Salaheden road [in Gaza], he explains why they have to drive slowly: people on foot are so traumatized by pain and the constant bombings that they don’t even hear cars. Along the lunar landscape he meets an old man who tells him that his fate is that of sheep, who are fed just enough to be sacrificed for the annual Eid feast. Among his old acquaintances, the average ‘displaced’ person has one and a half square meters to live—the Palestinians are ‘shipwrecked.’
“The stench from tons of rubbish, smashed sewage treatment plants and lack of water is overwhelming. He reminds us how Pope Francis summed up the situation: ‘It is cruelty, it is not war.’ Hospitals are systematically bombed, babies dying of hypothermia, dehydration and disease, doctors and nurses targeted, schools and universities destroyed, books and academic documents willfully destroyed by Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians are suffering ‘a violence worthy of the Last Judgment
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