Image by Emad El Byed.

Israel war of genocide is not about October 7; it is not about freeing Israeli captives. It is, first and foremost, about preserving a racist Jewish governing coalition and seizing a historic opportunity while a submissive administration in Washington looks the other way. The aim is to advance a biblical expansionist project and create the conditions for “self” ethnic cleansing, as part of the permanent erasure of the Palestinian people from their homeland.

As the U.N. officially declared a famine in Gaza City, Israel rejected the ceasefire and threatened to flatten Gaza City “like Beit Hanoun.” On July 11, Israeli Minister of War Israel Katz openly flaunted an aerial image of the razed cities of Rafah in the south and Beit Hanoun in the north, vowing that Gaza City would suffer the same fate.

Intoxicated by international impunity, Israel plans to force one million civilians from the north into a concentration camp, euphemistically called a “Humanitarian (Tent) City” in the south. Stripped of homes, starved, and bombed, Palestinians are being herded into cages to prepare for the “voluntary” expulsion from their country. In this regard, racist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told the Israeli military chief Eyal Zamir, “Whoever doesn’t evacuate . . . No water, no electricity, they can die of hunger…”

In the occupied West Bank, Smotrich has dusted off the old Israeli blueprint to further carve Palestine into disconnected fragments. His plan dismembers any supposed “future Palestinian state” into three broken pieces: two sealed-off ghettos in the West Bank and another in Gaza. The aim is to undermine the geographical contiguity of any future Palestinian state, while........

© CounterPunch