It has been 11 days since Israel started its latest offensive against the northern part of the Gaza Strip, which includes a complete siege of the towns of Jabalia, Beit Lahia, and Beit Hanoun just north of Gaza City. These were the first areas that the Israeli forces first entered at the beginning of the ground invasion almost a year ago, and they are also the first areas where the Israeli army declared “full operational control” after it had claimed to have destroyed all the fighting units of the Palestinian resistance factions.
The ongoing Israeli assault includes a ground invasion of the town of Jabalia and its refugee camp for the third time in a year. For 11 days, Israeli forces have imposed a siege on Jabalia and pounded it with intensive artillery shelling and airstrikes, destroying its remaining standing residential blocks and cutting the population off from Gaza City directly to the south. Israeli forces have also clashed with Palestinian fighters from different resistance factions. Last week, the armed wing of Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, released video footage showing an ambush in which its fighters targeted a group of Israeli jeeps and armored vehicles with IEDs and anti-armor projectiles, showcasing their organization, planning, and fighting capacities a year after Israel declared that it has destroyed all resistance in the city.
According to the Palestinian Civil Defense, at least 350 Palestinians have been killed in northern Gaza since the beginning of the ongoing offensive. But beyond the direct victims of bombings and shelling, the Israeli offensive on the north is strangling an estimated 200,000 Palestinians who remain in their homes in the area. Testimonies from survivors in Jabalia told Mondoweiss that they are surviving on canned food and whatever remains of vegetables or meat that entered through humanitarian aid before the start of the siege. What little food remains, locals say, is now being sold for ten times its normal price.
Israel’s current offensive on northern Gaza is being reported in the media as the apparent implementation of what has come to be known as “the Generals’ Plan.” The plan is based on a vision laid out in two separate articles by retired Israeli general Giora Eiland in the early months of the war. Eiland’s vision is that Israel should impose unlivable conditions on the inhabitants of northern Gaza by starving them out and forcing them to leave the south. Whoever remains, Eiland said, would be considered a Hamas member or sympathizer, and thus a legitimate target. The idea is to drain northern Gaza of its population and thus isolate Hamas from its social base, forcing it to capitulate or die.
While Israel has not saved a single inch of the Gaza Strip from attack over the past year, its focus on the north of Gaza, and Jabalia in particular, is twofold. Northern Gaza, particularly Gaza City, is the most populous area of the Gaza Strip, containing more than 50% of the Strip’s population. Jabalia has traditionally been a stronghold of support for Hamas, and has proven to be a place where the resistance has been able to recoup despite massive hits since last October. By tightening the noose around northern Gaza and squeezing out what little life is left, Israel will be able to further its goal of ethnic cleansing and annexation.
Last September, several Israeli generals endorsed Eiland’s vision and proposed it to the government. Netanyahu then told Israeli lawmakers that he was considering the “Generals’ Plan,” which was recently reported on by AP. Two weeks later, the siege on the north and the ground invasion of Jabalia began.
Despite the media attention that the plan has received as an Israeli strategic innovation in the war, there is nothing new about it. In essence, it is an enhanced version of the same Israeli anti-insurgency strategy that it has practiced since it first started fighting guerilla resistance groups shortly after its founding. This strategy was formalized in the 2006 Second Lebanon War under the “Dahiya Doctrine,” named after the mass destruction Israel caused in Beirut’s southern suburb and formulated by the Israeli army’s former Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkott. The Dahiya Doctrine is essentially a strategy of mass collective punishment, designed to cause “disproportionate” damage to civilian infrastructure under the assumption that either the population will turn on the resistance or the resistance will give up.
The hidden agenda: resettlement
However, Giora Eiland’s vision has another component not encompassed in the Dahiya Doctrine: the forcible transfer of the population through constant bombardment and starvation, forcing them to leave or die.
This isn’t the first time Israel has tried to carry out this vision throughout the Gaza genocide. Since October of last year, Israel forced around a million Gazans to leave northern Gaza and Gaza City to flee south of Wadi Gaza, the river that separates Gaza City from central and southern Gaza. Israel also created a military zone around Wadi Gaza called the Netzarim corridor, making it impossible for Palestinians to return to their homes in the north. Israel has insisted on preventing their return and has been one of the main sticking points in ceasefire talks. Israel maintains this position, ironically as it wages a second war on Lebanon with the stated objective of returning Israelis to the north, which has largely been evacuated since the start of the war due to the “support front” launched by Hezbollah on October 8, 2023.
The unspoken component of the Generals’ Plan in northern Gaza, however, relates to Israel’s desire to resettle Gaza–in other words, to replace the Palestinian population with an Israeli settler population, which would mean the eventual annexation of northern Gaza to Israel proper.
In January, a group of Israeli settler organizations celebrated a conference in Jerusalem attended by thousands of settlers to voice their demands to be allowed to move to Gaza. In the conference, Daniela Weiss, a leading figure of the hardline settler movement, said in a speech that “neither Hamas nor the PLO nor the UN nor UNRWA, but only Jews can rule Gaza.” In an interview with Israeli media, Weiss called for erasing Gaza and letting Israelis move there “so that they can see the sea.” The conference was attended by Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s key allies, who endorsed Weiss and the demands of the settlers.
The essence of the Israeli experiment
Even this implicit aspect of the Generals’ plan is not particularly novel. The depopulation of Palestinian land with the object of replacing the native population with settlers has been the essence of the Zionist project since its inception. What Israeli is trying to do in Jabalia and northern Gaza is a continuation of what the Zionist movement did in 1948 and has continued to do more gradually ever since.
The Generals’ Plan is a condensation of century-long colonial policy. Haifa, Yafa, Askalan, Tyberias, and West Jerusalem all used to be northern Gaza. Today, the southern Hebron hills and the Jordan Valley, where Palestinians are not allowed to build or graze and are attacked by Israeli settlers, are a less intense version of northern Gaza. The Bedouin villages in the Naqab, which are unrecognized by the state of Israel and live under the constant threat of demolition, are yet another version of northern Gaza.
The inaction of world governments, especially the U.S., to stop the realization of the Generals’ Plan in Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia suggests that these governments endorse the plan and its larger strategy of genocidal ethnic cleansing.
The only thing standing in the way of the Generals’ Plan is the decision of more than 200,000 Palestinians to stay in the north and refuse displacement, despite the bombs, drone attacks, hunger, and brutal siege. The clash of these two wills is the essence of the war for Palestine since 1948.
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss.