The IDF soldiers defying Netanyahu's expulsion zone in Gaza

Times

15 hours ago

When the Israeli soldier first entered Gaza, he believed the war was righteous. But with each passing deployment, Avshalom Zohar Sal's missions made less and less sense to him and the war goals grew murkier and murkier.
'What I saw the first time I entered was not what I encountered the second time, nor the third nor the fourth,' he said. 'Every time, Gaza looked different, the mission looked different, and my personal feelings were different.'
The step that Sal, 28, then took has put him at the heart of an extraordinary power struggle in Israel. He and two friends, reservists serving in the war, hired lawyers to petition the High Court to rule on whether Israel's actions in Gaza nearly two years after the atrocities of October 7, 2023, had become a violation of international law.
The appeal is a 'last resort' for the petitioners, who 'suspect that the leaders of the state and the army are asking them to be partner to a war that has forced displacement, forced transfer and even the expulsion of thousands, millions of citizens at its core'.
At the same time Binyamin Netanyahu 's government was drawing up a plan to transfer part of the population of southern Gaza into an enclosed camp containing only vetted civilians. Anyone outside of the 'humanitarian city', which could include up to 600,000 people, would then be considered a terrorist and a potential target of Israeli fire.
Two months after the petition was lodged, the office of Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, the chief of staff, issued his response last weekend, stating that the 'concentration and movement of the population are not part of the objectives of the war, and that the IDF certainly does not force the population to move inside or outside the Gaza Strip'.
The refusal marked an unprecedented red line through the defence ministry's blueprint and reportedly led to a heated exchange between Zamir and Netanyahu during a war cabinet meeting.
Israel's acknowledged war goals are to destroy Hamas and free the remaining hostages taken on October 7, when about 1,200 people were killed in Israel.
'If the mission is now, expulsion, occupation and Jewish settlement, like they are discussing, then it's an illegal one and I will not do it,' said Sal. 'This will either lead to an unprecedented confrontation between the army and state, the likes of which we've never seen before, or the army will bow and salute the order, and carry out a plan that will harm Israel for generations to come.'
Gazans at al-Shifa hospital mourn relatives killed by Israeli bombing on Saturday
MAJDI FATHI/NURPHOTO/SHUTTERSTOCK
More than 56,000 people have died in the conflict, according to the Hamas-run health ministry and charities say that a large proportion of Gaza's 2.3 million people are at risk of starvation because of Israeli restrictions on food and medicine.
A report based on interviews with soldiers by +972 Magazine in Israel said that civilian evacuations in Gaza are sometimes enforced by drones used to bomb civilians to force them to leave their homes or prevent them from returning to evacuated areas.
Negotiations are continuing over a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which would allow the release of some of the hostages still held in Gaza. It had been hoped that a deal would be struck last week.
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Israel Katz, the defence minister, has said that he planned to use that time to build an encampment for civilians in the largely destroyed city of Rafah, where Israeli troops will remain stationed, one of the sticking points of the deal.
It was Katz's earlier offer for Palestinians to 'voluntarily emigrate' with no return date, that persuaded Sal and his friends to submit their petition. The deadline for his ministry to issue a response passed on Thursday.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) say there is no disagreement between the government and the army.
A senior general said that civilians would be moved according to international law the same way they have been moved throughout the war: by issuing evacuation orders to numbered blocks that correspond with certain areas and turning those areas into active combat zones, giving civilians 24-72 hours to clear out or else be considered an active threat.
The transfer of the Gazan population is not a war goal, said Brigadier General Oren Solomon, because the war goal is to eliminate Hamas. But the way to do it is to separate the general population from the terrorists by building several camps.
'We don't go against the political directives. We act on them. The debate is over how it will happen, and we know that we can't just make one place. We understand that the humanitarian city can't take the entire population, so we must make a few like that,' Solomon said.
ABDALHKEM ABU RIASH/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES
The pilot plan is to move 600,000 Palestinians in the tent city of Al-Mawasi, a narrow strip of coastal land where thousands of homeless Palestinians reside. Israel says Hamas are hiding among the displaced civilians, and so Al-Mawasi must be cleared out and the civilians checked and moved to the 'sterile' zone with 'tents, water, medical care, food — all without being stolen by Hamas'.
The plan has been discussed in the Israeli media, but there has been little reaction from mainstream society, which remains traumatised by October 7.
'The sentiment of the majority of the population are indifferent to the humanitarian situation in Gaza,' said Idit Shafran Gittleman, a former director of the military and society programme at the Israel Democracy Institute. 'Their main thought is, 'Don't give us October 7 again. Do whatever you need to do so we can live here without this fear of October coming again.''
She does not see a scenario where there is mass refusal to serve, nor a situation where the prime minister will sack the new army chief.
If the plan is passed through the cabinet, the army must enact it. However, the legal apparatus — including a court ruling against the transfer brought on by Sal's petition — may stop the plan in its tracks. It has come at a personal cost for the educator and reservist, who is about to move in with his girlfriend to a kibbutz on the Gaza border.
'People will see this and call me a traitor from one side, and a Palestinian child killer on the other,' Sal said. 'No one thinks about this situation that I find myself in as an Israeli citizen. I am different from what the government purports to represent, that I possess values rooted in Judaism and Israel that are completely anti-war.'