“Breaking the Silence,” a group of former IDF soldiers, founded 20 years ago, has released a statement exposing the deliberate ethnic cleansing of Gaza. It reads:
The US deadline to improve humanitarian conditions in northern Gaza has expired, and the IDF’s mass bombing and starvation campaign to expel its residents has worsened. The IDF clearly stated—residents won’t be allowed to return. In other words: ethnically cleansing the area.
After the IDF already split Gaza in two with an ever expanding Netzarim corridor (named after a settlement evicted from Gaza in 2005), it built another corridor in the north, cutting Gaza City off from Jabalya, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia. A siege within a siege within a siege. In October the IDF drastically decreased the amount of aid entering northern Gaza, publicly stating none would enter north of Gaza City for over a month. Attempting to justify this to the public, the IDF claimed there were no civilians in the area—a blatant and abhorrent lie.
Adding to this, the mass-bombing campaign in northern Gaza has killed dozens on average every day over the past month. The so-called “precise” bombings were made worse by the use of imprecise-by-definition artillery shells. A deliberate intent to destroy, as much as possible.
Last week, IDF Brig-Gen Itzik Cohen, who currently commands the division holding Jabalya, told Israeli news outlets “there are no civilians left” north of the new corridor, yet 36 Gazans were killed in an IDF strike on Sunday in Jabalya. The UN estimates tens of thousands of civilians are still there. Photos show masses fleeing.
The IDF tendency to consider an area “empty of civilians” once it calls citizens to evacuate is not new, and shouldn’t be treated as such. We saw similar “kill zones” in 2008 and 2014. Once the leaflets are dropped, anyone left in the area essentially becomes a legitimate target.
[Our brigade commander] went so far as to say this was war and in war as in war, no consideration of civilians was to be taken. You shoot anyone you see. I’m paraphrasing [...] but the gist of the matter was very clear. They told us: “There aren’t supposed to be any civilians there. If you spot someone, shoot.” Whether it posed a threat or not wasn’t a question... [T]hey made it clear that there were no uninvolved civilians.
“This is the default. No civilians are supposed to be in the area, that’s the perspective. We spotted someone in a window, so they fired and killed him,” one soldier told Oren Ziv for +972 Magazine in July. Kill zones are nothing new, all that’s really changed is the scale. Brig-Gen Itzik Cohen also made clear that there’s “no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes.” Forced transfer, which also lays the groundwork for possible resettlement. The IDF is ethnically cleansing northern Gaza.
