As Israel spreads carnage throughout Lebanon it has a new extermination plan for Gaza
“In recent days, Israel has unleashed on Lebanon some of the heaviest aerial attacks in the history of modern warfare, outpacing the bombardment of Gaza during the opening days of the Israel-Hamas war last October,” stated The New York Times on Sept. 25. Israel ordered Lebanese in the south of the country to leave their homes or be considered Hezbollah supporters. A million people out of a population of less than six million have now been displaced from their villages and areas of Beirut, with thousands fleeing to Syria. Israel justifies its slaughter on a single day (Sept. 23) of more than 550 people, many of them children, by terming them Hezbollah’s ‘human shields.’ Four days later it reportedly used as many as 80 bombs, including US supplied ‘bunker busters,’ to annihilate Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders, and subsequently bombed the Yemeni port of Hodeidah. The number killed in Lebanon now surpasses a thousand.
Why this latest killing spree? Israel declares its aim is to spread calm so its citizens in the northern region of the country can move back to their homes. It could achieve this goal by declaring a ceasefire in Gaza, which is what Hezbollah says is would take for it to cease its own fire. But this Netanyahu declines to do. And the Biden Administration which has repeatedly mouthed the word ‘ceasefire’ while providing Israel with weapons (including more than 14,000 MK-84 2,000-pound bombs and a recent $8.7 billion weapons package) to demolish the Gaza Strip – and now areas of Lebanon – is going along with this latest phase of Israel’s lethal game plan, which could include yet another stab at creating an Israeli-controlled ‘buffer zone’ south of Lebanon’s Litani River.
Meanwhile, what some Israeli Ministers and Generals have in mind for the Gaza Strip is an extermination zone. They have proposed, and Netanyahu is considering, ordering the entire population in Gaza City and the north of the Gaza Strip – some300,000 people – to evacuate. According to the ‘General’s Plan’, “Those who leave will receive food and water. But in a week the entire territory of the northern Gaza Strip will become a military zone, and as far as we’re concerned, no supply will enter this military zone…therefore 5,000 terrorists who are in this area would in this situation either surrender or starve to death.” This is similar to what the Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli has proposed for southern Lebanon.
As Gaza’s known death toll tops 41,500 with nearly 100,000 wounded, the entry of humanitarian aid continues to be severely restricted by Israel. According to a far-ranging report by Michel Fakhri, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Gaza’s entire food system has been destroyed and “Israel’s starvation campaign shows no sign of abating.” He calls it “a gradual and deliberate strategy that was set in motion many years ago.”
ProPublica has revealed that last April, both USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration supplied Secretary of State Blinken with reports detailing how Israel was blocking the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and was targeting aid workers and bombing ambulances and hospitals. According to US law, this should have triggered a suspension of arms shipments. But Blinken told Congress that Israel was not restricting aid, permitting the flow of weapons to continue. There have been some 50,000 tons shipped since last October with no end in sight, as the US urges Israel not to widen the war while supplying it with the military support to do exactly that.
Design by Paul Normandia of Red Sun Press.
