The Gaza Starvation Plan: I didn’t accept my reserve call-up orders for this.
When you’re in the midst of war, it is difficult to form an opinion and find a moment to think clearly. But during the last few days every time I looked at my phone, my stomach ached and I got a lump in the throat. I get the feeling that something terrible is happening a long, long way away from our collective hearts and minds. ■ Ariel Schwartz, an IDF reservist, writes from the northern border about the “Generals’ Plan”.
By Ariel Schwartz • WallaNews • Translated by Sol Salbe
It’s hard to write when you’re in the middle of a war. The incessant noise of shells, the fear of drones, the frequent calls into action, the heat, the cold, guard duty at night. After more than 100 days of reserve duty, it is difficult to form an opinion and find a moment to think clearly.
But when I’ve looked at my phone over the past few days, I saw pictures from Gaza that made it impossible for me to sleep at night. Children getting burnt alive inside a tent, hungry people, girls walking barefoot carrying few objects on their backs, old people lying there having been shot and wounded. Since then, my stomach has been aching and there is lump in my throat. There is a sense that something terrible is happening a long, long way away from our collective hearts and minds.
Because the hearts and minds of us reservists honed on our active service here and pine for the time afterwards at home. We’re preoccupied with our families that are being crushed under the pressure, and with attending funerals and annual memorials (how are we already commemorating people killed in this war?) and with eulogies for good-natured people. But when we bury our dead and concentrate on the good of the country and not on ourselves, some disturbing things keep on popping in our minds because we know they are happening a mere an hour and a half away from home.
Giora Eiand’s Generals’ Plan sounds sparklingly brilliant. But when you look at it closely, it gets really ghastly. This is a plan whose official goal is the deliberate starvation of hundreds of thousands of people in order to expel them and flatten almost the entire northern Gaza Strip.
Behind the plan are Giora Eiland, who believes that “severe epidemics in the southern Gaza Strip will hasten our victory”, Tzav 9, an organisation infamous for blocking and looting humanitarian aid trucks, and the Misgav Institute under the auspices of the Kohelet Forum, which we all know well.
According to the plan, over 300,000 people living in the northern Gaza Strip will be ordered to leave within a week. Anyone who does not leave will be held as a terrorist and in effect will be sentenced to death.
But testimonies from people on the ground indicate that not always is there enough time given to leave and that many people — babies, the elderly, children — are in no hurry to evacuate after exhaustion, hunger, the many evacuations they have undergone this year, the fear of entering an unsafe area, the journey that awaits them and the knowledge that it is far from certain that they will have somewhere to return to. In recent weeks, hundreds of non-combatants have been killed in this area as part of its overall evacuation mission.
And for what? As soldiers and civilians, we were told from the first moment that toppling the Hamas regime and returning the abductees were the goals of the war. We have all mobilised for these goals.
More than a year has passed and the return of 101 abductees has never seemed farther away. There is no significant deal on the agenda, and Netanyahu himself admitted after Sinwar’s assassination that his replacement would “set even tougher conditions for a hostage deal.”
The government’s campaign to “topple the Hamas regime” is also an attempt to blindside all of us. And it wasn’t me who said it, but the IDF Spokesperson himself, Daniel Hagari, last June: “This business of destroying Hamas, making Hamas disappear — it’s simply throwing sand in the eyes of the public. Anyone who thinks we can make Hamas disappear is mistaken… What you can do is to develop something else to replace it. Something that will make the population realise that someone else is distributing the food, that someone else is doing the public services. If we don’t bring something else to Gaza, at the end of the day we will get Hamas.”
So if we are not advancing to a hostage agreement or replacing the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip, what is the purpose of the Generals’ Plan and the starvation and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people, women and babies? [Prominent right-wing journalist] Amit Segal wrote last August: “Ministers in the government are pushing Netanyahu to order the total and absolute eviction of Gaza City’s entire population, meaning one hundred to two hundred thousand people. The security justification is the removal of the threat to the Netzarim Corridor from the north. The real justification is the shock and despair that this will sow in Palestinian public opinion when Gaza falls.”
So Amit Seal already told us that this is not really a security need. But much has happened to us since August, and the intention of those ministers who are “pushing Netanyahu to order the total and absolute eviction of Gaza City’s entire population” has become clear in all its glory in recent weeks — the establishment of Jewish outposts in the Gaza Strip.
While we were serving in the reserves and marking the first Memorial Day of October 7, the Likud movement had already invited the public to a conference of Getting Ready for Settlement in Gaza, in which ministers and Knesset members from other parties took part. 27 coalition members, including senior ministers, participated in Gaza settlement preparation gatherings in recent months. People stood there on the stage and said unequivocally: We must starve, expel, annihilate and occupy the northern Gaza Strip. All in order to establish a Jewish settlement there.
I don’t believe that this was the goal of this war in advance. But with the vacuum that has been created, the continuation of the war, the horizon of which is no longer clear, and with no apparent strategic plan, extreme right-wing elements know how to take advantage of the situation and drag us all into doing some horrible stuff.
It’s my feeling that my back and the lives of my loved ones are being used to promote things that have nothing to do with our security or the return of the abductees which were the declared aims of the war. Our dedication, our sacrifice, our desire to protect our families, the knowledge that we will turnup to serve again and again when we are called upon, are being used to leverage this war into an endless carnage that can no longer be justified.
There is no dispute that the military campaign in Gaza is extremely complex. Israel faces an enemy that cynically uses the civilian population as a shield and uses places like hospitals and schools for belligerent action. But even in this complex situation, it is important to draw red lines for military conduct. The starvation and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of uninvolved civilians must not be turned into our program for action. It is not for nothing that Eran Etzion, former deputy head of the National Security Council, said that a “black flag” is flying over this plan.
It is our duty to say this — the Generals’ Plan is bad for Israel. It is bad for who we are, for the Jews we are, for the Israelis we are. Only a strategy for the day after the war will bring back the hostages and topple the Hamas regime. Anything else — the expulsions, the starvations, the military plans, the pompous declarations — will only bring more and more blood but not security.
Ariel Schwartz writes from his reserve service on the Lebanese border, after serving as a combat soldier for over 100 days on the Gaza front. He is a lawyer and social worker, a jurisprudence doctoral student and a graduate of the Noga program of the Molad Institute.
[Walla! News is one of the major Israeli news websites.]
