Israel's move to take over Gaza looks likely to be open-ended occupation
You see it arriving at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport. It has been used to illustrate the Israel Defense Forces' 'values' page, and appears endlessly in the Hebrew media and on pro-Israel sites.
It is ironic that at the end of his life the central figure in the picture, Yitzhak Yifat, rejected at least some of the photograph's meaning. Speaking to the Guardian in 2017, with the benefit of five decades of hindsight, he reflected on that conquest.
'I can say that the results of the war were bad. We realised that we had conquered another people. A whole people. And now it seems we cannot now get to a true peace, a real peace,' he said.
What was true then remains true today, as Israel's security cabinet has authorised the full occupation once again of Gaza, beginning with Gaza City.
While Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested it will be required until Hamas can be replaced, the international community should consider the strong likelihood that Israel will maintain an open-ended control of all of Gaza – a recipe, say critics, for perpetual war.
And although the statement from Netanyahu's office describing the decision and its aims is absent the word 'occupation' – with all the international legal obligations that would entail – no one should be in any doubt that this is what is envisaged
Netanyahu's history in politics and diplomacy is one of endless excuses for why Israel should never meet the commitments it made in the Oslo peace process towards real self-determination and a Palestinian state, describing endlessly over the years the lack of a 'partner for peace' or claiming that any Palestinian state would be a threat to Israel.
In practical terms, Israel's decision to seize full control of Gaza appears as reckless as it is delusional and inhuman, not least the notion that Israel will maintain control until the 'establishment of an alternative civil administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority'. As it currently stands, that alternative remains a fiction of Netanyahu's imagination.
What will seem more plausible for many will be the far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich's unpalatable parsing of the decision on Friday. 'We are erasing the Palestinian state,' he declared, 'first in action and then officially.'
In financial terms, as Israeli media have pointed out, the move is likely to place another huge financial burden on a country that has been haemorrhaging money during more than two years of conflict in theatres from Lebanon to Syria, Iran, Yemen and Gaza.
Speaking to the rightwing Israel Hayom newspaper this week, Ram Aminach, an expert in Israel's military economics, suggested that the cost of taking Gaza under full control could run to almost $6bn in the coming months, with 'incomprehensible costs' associated with sustaining a Palestinian population of 2 million people in a shattered territory.
'Look at the international pressure Israel faces today and multiply that by five, at the least,' he said. 'To ease that pressure, we'll need to take care of the population in Gaza. No international player is going to help pay for that, not while Israel is seen the way it is right now.'
And there is an even bigger question: whether Israel has the resources to maintain an occupation that may be long-term.
Envisaged, according to briefings to Israeli journalists, as involving five divisions in an operation lasting five to six months, it assumes that the IDF is capable of achieving more than it has in two and a half years of war in which it has been forced to launch multiple operations in areas where it has claimed Hamas was defeated only to see fighters return.
Nor is the recent history of military occupations encouraging, not least the US and British experience of insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That appears, at least in part, to have been in the mind of the IDF's chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, when he made clear his opposition to the plan, suggesting it would lead to the death of the remaining Israeli hostages and greater risk to soldiers in an already exhausted Israeli military from IEDs.
While Zamir has expressed his opposition in private to Netanyahu, others have made the same points publicly, among them the Israeli opposition leader, Yair Lapid, who described the decision as a 'disaster that will lead to many more disasters'.
Charging that Netanyahu had been dragged into the decision by his far-right allies who have campaigned for Jewish settlement in Gaza, he described the plan as 'a move that will kill the hostages and many soldiers, will cost Israeli taxpayers tens of billions and will destroy Israel's diplomatic relations'.
'This is exactly what Hamas wanted: for Israel to end up stuck in Gaza without a goal, in a useless occupation, the point of which no one understands,' Lapid said.
All of which leaves what will be regarded by many in the international community as the most glaringly problematic issue. While the IDF controls 75% of Gaza, the remaining 25% of territory where the new Netanyahu offensive will be focused is where 80% of Gaza's population has been displaced to.
How Israel plans to achieve its full control without a massive increase in civilian deaths in an already starving and desperate Palestinian population is chillingly undescribed.
Multiple mass fatality incidents around the Israeli- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's food distribution sites – where, according to the UN and other aid organisations, Israeli soldiers have killed hundreds of aid seekers – suggests that the IDF should not be counted on to behave humanely when confronted by those civilians.
Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, said on Friday: 'The Israeli government's decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong and we urge it to reconsider immediately. This action will do nothing to bring an end to this conflict or to help secure the release of the hostages. It will only bring more bloodshed.'
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The Guardian
27 minutes ago
- The Guardian
My years reporting on Gaza broke me down. Why did it take so long for the world to become outraged?
When I moved to Jerusalem in 2010, the foreign correspondents there offered me some unsettling advice: 'The first year here you'll hate the Israeli government, the second year the Palestinian leadership, by the third you'll hate yourself.' It's best to leave before four, I was told, in the interest of sanity. I nodded along thinking how sadly cynical they were. I would do better than that, I told myself. I did not. I lasted a little under four years in Israel and Palestine. In that time, I reported on forced displacement and punitive bureaucracy (Israel's occupation is expanded through denied permits, home demolitions and revoked ID cards). I wrote about child killings, war crimes and terrorism (perpetrated by both sides). I tried to explain as best I could the annexation of the West Bank and the collective punishment of two million people in Gaza without using forbidden phrases such as apartheid or war crime. I included the necessary balance of voices and opinions. But still, every report of an atrocity in Palestine was met with highly personal accusations of bias. Editors were often twitchy, readers disengaged. After two years of this, a grim reality became clear: people did not want to hear about it. By year three, I had started giving up trying to make them listen and the self-loathing arrived. Cynicism among reporters is a useful cipher for the fear, desperation and impotence that news industry norms do not allow them, but it has a dangerous side-effect: it dulls outrage. Without outrage, crimes such as apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide can continue uninterrupted – and they have. Over a decade later, with Gaza's annihilation playing in my social media feed, I have been finishing my first novel, Vulture, for the past two years. It is the story of a reporter, Sara Byrne, trying to make a name for herself amid a war in Gaza. She is a destructive character steeped in cynicism and self-loathing who emerged, in all her surprising unpleasantness, as I tried to resolve my own experience as a journalist covering Palestine. There were nagging doubts and questions I could not shift, like: why have those of us whose job it was to report the atrocities in Palestine been so spectacularly unable to stop them? The action in Vulture is fiction but set within the real time frame of the 2012 war in Gaza, which I covered. I was visiting Gaza City when the Hamas leader Ahmed al-Jabari was assassinated. I arrived at the site of his 'liquidation' within an hour, the burned-out frame of his car still smouldering. I noticed the blood splatters reaching the second floor of surrounding buildings in the writing of my first front page. Israel had launched its Operation Pillar of Defence. Wars were never surprising in Gaza. Since 2006, when the last general election in Palestine paved the way for Hamas to take power and Israel and Egypt to impose their blockade, there has been a regular exchange of rockets fired by Hamas and bombs dropped by the Israeli military. Every few years, Israeli generals declared a military operation to bomb back Hamas infrastructure. Chatting comfortably off the record, retired military people called it 'mowing the grass'. In the 2009 war – 1,400 Palestinians killed, 11,000 homes destroyed, white phosphorus shells dropped on markets and hospitals – Israel had not let foreign journalists into Gaza. In 2012, they did. Most of us stayed at the Al Deira hotel, eating and sleeping next to one another, reporting and filing the same stories. Uniformed staff brought us coffees and french fries as airstrikes threatened their homes and families. Every day, we visited bombed homes and I made notes: smell of cooking gas, kitchen gone little kids playing in rubble find a beetle a crying woman tugging at a buried mattress screams We watched a steady stream of dead and injured arrive at al-Shifa hospital missing limbs and heads, dust-covered children mute and shaking having seen their parents killed. Doctors told us of power and drug shortages. I noted them: no disposables anaesthetics running out, can't do surgeries lots of women and children with amputated limbs, quite clean, bombs do the job for us We went to the funerals of whole families and spoke to mourners who asked us: 'You see anyone here with a gun?' After 10 days of Israel's operation – 167 Palestinians killed, 1,500 targets in Gaza hit, 700 families displaced – a truce was declared. The particular camaraderie you form with your Palestinian colleagues under airstrikes is severed abruptly when they drop you off at the Israeli border; you are thrilled to be driving back to normality, but they are unable to. You'll see them again when the next flare-up in violence brings you back. But when the next war came in 2014, I was already home in London, an editor on the Guardian foreign desk: 50 days of fighting, 2,104 Palestinians killed, 10,000 wounded. News audiences, we heard, were tuning out. The fighting ended, and I left the foreign desk to return to reporting. People looked at me warily when I brought up Palestine again. Was I a weird zealot? Or worse, an activist? I was neither, but outside of activist circles, the 'political complexity' of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict left little appetite for anything other than its most violent escalations or worst humanitarian catastrophes. Cynicism, it turns out, is better company than outrage. So I stopped talking about what I knew was going on over there – the daily humiliations of occupation in the West Bank, the threat of settler terrorism backed by an occupation force, the extraordinary trauma of living a day in Gaza – until I sat down to start work on a novel in 2015 and Palestine poured out. I was drawn straight back to the Al Deira hotel, reimagined as The Beach. I found myself telling this huge, indigestible tragedy in small, messy, blackly funny, heartbreaking, angry human stories. It was a relief, describing freely the Gaza I knew. By 7 October 2023, I had left the Guardian. I watched news of the Hamas terror attack devastated and sickened, then gripped with cold dread for what would follow in Gaza. Like anyone who had covered the place for any length of time, I had seen what was coming rehearsed for decades. Those nagging questions became urgent: had I done everything I could to warn this was coming? No. Did that make me complicit? Maybe. Israel has not allowed foreign press into Gaza for this war. Our understanding of what is happening there comes from the Palestinian journalists living it and they are being killed in extraordinary numbers (176, a 10% mortality rate), their newsrooms obliterated along with their families and homes. The ones who remain are starving. Their reporting is not balanced, it is personal and outraged. A year before Israeli forces killed him on 24 March, local journalist Hossam Shabat told his 175,000 X followers: 'The biggest problem is not Western journalists being unable to enter, but the fact that Western media doesn't respect and value Palestinian journalists … No one knows Gaza like we do, and no one understands the complexity of the situation like we do. If you care about what's happening in Gaza, you should amplify Palestinian voices.' His message stung deeply. It clarified the discomfort I had felt as an unnecessary interlocutor between western readers and Gaza's tragedy, raising more questions about my work there. Western journalists reporting from Palestine did not stop the atrocities because we believed that was not our job, we were there to bear witness. Maintaining our impartiality is crucial if we are to be trusted. But were we not also meant to hold power to account? If we had condemned the US and Europe-backed power we knew was perpetrating these atrocities with the conviction and outrage they deserved, would 60,000 people still have been killed in 21 months? As Vulture lands on bookshelves in the US, UN experts have confirmed that famine is under way in the Gaza Strip. Starving people are being gunned down at food distribution sites. Its hospitals have been bombed, doctors and their families killed. The electricity has been cut off. Our Palestinian colleagues are being murdered in staggering numbers and western journalists say it is not on them to name the genocide. Yet fiction writers do. In the interest of balance, the BBC has decided not to air its documentary about doctors in Gaza. Until this week, when even Donald Trump was forced to acknowledge 'real starvation', a friend working in television news told me a new verb had emerged: to Gaza a story, meaning to downgrade its editorial importance. Finally, it seems the forbidden words are being named – genocide, famine, statehood – and our leaders may act to do something about them. But our outrage has come much too late. Why did we wait? Our wary silence abetted the tragedy in Gaza. Our cynicism allowed for the defining horror of a generation. Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood is out 12 August 2025 on Europa Editions
Reuters
27 minutes ago
- Reuters
Israel faces growing calls to scrap new Gaza offensive plans
JERUSALEM/CAIRO, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Israel's far-right finance minister has demanded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scrap his plan to seize Gaza City in favour of a tougher one, while Italy said on Sunday the plan could result in a "Vietnam" for Israel's army. Netanyahu's security cabinet, of which the minister, Bezalel Smotrich, is a member, approved the plan by majority on Friday to expand military operations in the shattered Palestinian enclave to try to defeat militant group Hamas. The move drew a chorus of condemnation within Israel, where thousands of people protested, opens new tab in Tel Aviv on Saturday calling for an immediate ceasefire and release of hostages held by militant group Hamas, as well as abroad. The United Nations Security Council was expected to meet later on Sunday to discuss the plan, with many countries expressing concern it could worsen already acute hunger among Palestinians. Netanyahu was expected to give a news conference for international media in Israel and make a televised announcement later in the day. It was not clear what he would say. Smotrich said he has lost faith in Netanyahu's ability and desire to lead to a victory over Hamas. The new plan, he said in a video on X late on Saturday, was intended to get Hamas back to ceasefire negotiations. The prime minister and the cabinet have decided to do "more of the same" he said, referring to the fact that Israeli troops have entered the city before and failed to defeat Hamas. He and other far-right members of Netanyahu's coalition argue that the plan does not go far enough while the army, which opposes military rule in Gaza, has warned it would endanger remaining hostages held by Hamas as well as Israeli troops. Smotrich stopped short of delivering a clear ultimatum to Netanyahu. Other far-right coalition allies of Netanyahu have also pushed for total military occupation of Gaza, the annexation of large swaths of the territory and the removal of much of its Palestinian population. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has made similar calls, told Army Radio on Sunday that the plan to take over Gaza City was a good one, as long as it was a first step. The Israeli military has warned that expanding the offensive could endanger the lives of hostages Hamas is still holding in Gaza, believed to number around 20, and draw its troops into protracted and deadly guerilla warfare. Italy said Israel should heed its army's warnings. "The invasion of Gaza risks turning into a Vietnam for Israeli soldiers," Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said in an interview with daily Il Messaggero. He reiterated calls for a United Nations mission led by Arab countries to "reunify the Palestinian state" and said Italy was ready to participate. The Security Council is likely to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the prospect of its worsening if the Israeli plan goes ahead but there has so far been little appetite among Arab states to send their troops in. Israel has already come under mounting pressure over widespread hunger and thirst in the enclave, prompting it to announce a series of new measures to ease aid distribution. The Israeli military said on Sunday that the contents of nearly 1,900 aid trucks were distributed last week from the Gaza sides of the Kerem Shalom and Zikim border crossings. A spokesperson was not immediately available to comment on the reported figure but the United Nations has said Gaza needs far more aid to come in. On Saturday, medics said that a 14-year-old boy was killed by an aid airdrop that fell on a tent encampment in central Gaza. A video, verified by Reuters, that went viral on social media, showed the parachuted aid box falling on the teenager who, among many other desperate Palestinians, was awaiting food. The Hamas-run Gaza government media office said the new death raised the number of people killed during the airdrops to 23 since the war began, almost two years ago. "We have repeatedly warned of the dangers of these inhumane methods and have consistently called for the safe and sufficient delivery of aid through land crossings, especially food, infant formula, medicines, and medical supplies," it said. Five more people, including two children, died of malnutrition and starvation in Gaza in the past 24 hours, the health ministry said, taking the number of deaths from such causes to 217, including 100 children. The war began on October 7 2023 when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel and killed 1,200 people, and took 251 hostages. Israeli authorities say 20 of the remaining 50 hostages in Gaza are alive. Israel's offensive in Gaza has since killed more than 61,000 Palestinians, according to health officials, and left much of the territory in ruins. Gaza medics said Israeli fire killed at least six Palestinians on Sunday, four of them in an airstrike in Khan Younis and two more people among crowds seeking aid in central Gaza. The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the report.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
The overzealous Online Safety Act means showing ID to get a pizza delivered
Want to order dinner from Pizza Hut? You'll have to show ID before you can take the box. Want to learn about what's happening in Gaza and Ukraine via social media? Ditto. Do you want to watch an MP's Commons speech on stopping child sexual abuse, sign up to Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana's new political party, or send a message to a friend on Bluesky? Listen to a podcast on Spotify? Get online support to stop smoking or drinking? Yes, altogether now: you'll have to show ID first. Welcome to the new normal, thanks to the government's Online Safety Act. Possibly our most vaguely drafted bit of legislation, it limped into force at the end of July with the stated aim of restricting children's access to pornography and any material that promotes suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, or otherwise abusive and hateful behaviour. Few will disagree that children being able to access such content is a real issue, and indeed, public polling from YouGov suggests that 80 per cent of the country agrees with that element of the act, although the question they're asked is simply whether they think kids shouldn't watch porn. The problem is that this Frankenstein's monster of a law, years in the making thanks to a contentious game of parliamentary ping-pong, isn't just, as the government is trying to spin it, a way to protect your child from online harm. The dragnet put into law by the government is so broad that users are being prompted to prove they're of age when they visit websites that have nothing whatsoever to do with these topics. Make no mistake: this is the digital equivalent of Brexit border checks; an unnecessary and self-inflicted bureaucracy that makes life materially harder and more frustrating for us all, simply to appease a small number of shouty voices. Already, support for the act is waning. Four in five of us supported it before it was implemented. When the rubber hit the road, and stop-and-search-style age checks started popping up on web browsers and phone screens, support dropped to 69 per cent. Half a million people have signed a petition asking the government to repeal it. The government has said they hear the criticism, but they're not going to listen, and has indeed told the likes of Nigel Farage and Reform UK that opposing the Act means they're on the side of predators like Jimmy Savile. The reality is that the Online Safety Act was always going to flounder, and anyone in government might have realised this would happen. Legislating the act was always a game of parliamentary pass the parcel, where whoever was caught holding it when the music stopped would unwrap a booby trap ready to explode. A different government might have kicked the can down the road for the next lot to handle. But they didn't, so here we are, lumbered with a law that doesn't work and which is a massive inconvenience to everyone. Now they've seen how it works, the proportion of the public who think the act won't be effective in its goal of stopping those under 18 getting access to adult content has shot up. It doesn't help that you can get around the supposedly world-leading age verification checks by opening up a new tab and typing in three little letters – VPN – or loading up a video game and pointing your camera at a character instead. We're used to politicians telling us up is down and night is day. But don't be fooled: this isn't working and it never will. We do need protections for children, so don't follow Nigel Farage's advice. Don't repeal it. Rewrite the law.
