Israel’s war minister, Israel Katz, declared with characteristic Zionist hubris: “Gaza is burning.” His words were not a battlefield report or a measured account of military progress. They were a boast – almost celebratory – as though the incineration of a city, a gas chamber for a million human beings, were what defined Israel’s notion of military achievement. In those three words lies the distilled truth of Israel’s project since 1948: a state that has built its very identity on the destruction of Palestinian life, priding itself on the ruins of villages emptied by force and the massacres buried beneath them.

Israeli officials claim that burning Gaza will secure “victory,” just as they once said before assaulting Rafah. In 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu described the invasion of the city of Rafah as essential to achieving “total victory.” On February 10, 2024, he told This Week on ABC that........

© The News International