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For three weeks, Muhammed Krayem and his family could barely find anything to eat as they endured a suffocating siege in northern Gaza, where the Israeli army continues what residents call an "ethnic cleansing" of the area. When one of their neighbours attempted to reach a school in search of canned food, he was shot directly in the leg by the Israeli army and left to bleed for over two hours while soldiers prevented anyone from approaching him. This images the story of tens and thousand others who have taken the punishment but refuse to leave the land. Civilians have a legal right to protection wherever they are across the Gaza Strip. Staying in the north doesn’t cancel this out. Issuing so-called “evacuation orders” doesn’t cancel out Israel’s legal obligation to protect civilians who remain.

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Israeli authorities have facilitated the transfer of Jewish Israelis to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and granted them superior status under the law as compared to Palestinians living in the same territory when it comes to civil rights, access to land, and freedom to move, build, and confer residency rights to close relatives.

While Palestinians have a limited degree of self-rule in parts of the OPT, Israel retains primary control over borders, airspace, the movement of people and goods, security, and the registry of the entire population, which in turn dictates such matters as legal status and eligibility to receive identity cards. This is apartheid and there are worse ways to describe it.

Israel’s brutality is ceaseless and vicious. In its savagery, the Israeli army has forcibly expelled Palestinians in northern Gaza from their shelters, as relayed by eyewitness accounts, news reports, and video footage.

Israel’s TV aired video footage of Israeli military trucks transferring dozens of blindfolded Palestinian detainees. Israel offered the deformed pretext that the Palestinians were taken in and arrested “for questioning”.

The Israeli army also released footage showing hundreds of Palestinians walking amid the rubble, surrounded by Israeli tanks as they all head in the same direction after being gathered in a destroyed square.

The Israeli army reportedly had “evacuated” 20,000 Palestinians from Jabalia which once had a population of 172,704 in 2017. The Jabalia refugee camp is adjacent to the city to the north. Today, that number has drastically declined after persistent and savage massacres, leaving hundreds upon hundreds dead, and thousands fleeing for their lives..

The bulk of these numbers include babies, children, and women. Israeli drones threateningly show drones airing a recorded voice ordering Palestinians to leave the hospital premises. The drones reportedly also dropped leaflets ordering Palestinians to leave. The numbers are not exaggerated by the Israeli army

People are in a quandary. They’re damned if they go and damned if they don’t. The Israeli army has already bombed people while leaving on the routes that the occupation army designated as safe, and because they have been bombing people in the so-called safe-zones. That accounts for many killings of people who chose the risk of staying on in their shelters. Those who had been enforced to leave displacement shelters left northern Gaza. The majority went elsewhere in the same area.

Israel’s policy of enforcement includes destroying homes to render them unlivable. Many of the testimonies by survivors indicate that Israeli troops set fire to displacement shelters after forcing Palestinians to leave, destroying the belongings they left behind. Hundreds of Palestinians took shelter from the bombings. Israeli soldiers ordered displaced Palestinians to leave the school and gave them little time to gather their belongings.

People complained that the displaced Palestinians watched soldiers setting fire to the school while they were leaving and that some soldiers even had the audacity to take pictures of them while doing it. Israeli forces have demolished buildings and even entire residential blocks by detonation in Jabalia, effectively rendering most of the area uninhabitable.

Israeli soldiers report that they had been setting Palestinian buildings on fire with explicit sanction from their commanders. Palestinians who survived Israel’s destruction of the al-Shifa Hospital said that Israeli soldiers had set fire to entire floors in the medical complex leaving the entire medical complex burned. In a tone of gloom, the Deputy Director of al-Shifa Medical Centre told the media: “Al-Shifa is finished, forever.”

The Palestinian Civil Defense lost three of its rescuers, all killed by Israeli fire while evacuating Palestinians. All its operations have been halted in all of northern Gaza, leaving the population without any humanitarian services. Israel’s siege and offensive on northern Gaza have been ongoing for 20 days, as part of what has been described as the implementation of Israel’s “Generals’ Plan,” which aims to forcibly depopulate northern Gaza through deliberate starvation and extermination. Although the Generals’ Plan doesn’t include plans for settler colonization of the area after its ethnic cleansing, far-right Israeli politicians and settler groups have been advocating for settling Gaza since December 2023.

At a rally in at Kibbutz Be’eri just three kilometers from Gaza’s 700 settlers, including Ministers, gathered demanding to settle in the Strip. Northern Gaza was home to some 700,000 Palestinians before October 7, 2023. As reports surface of intensified Israeli strikes and mounting casualties, the UN issues a stern warning, citing potential atrocity crimes in Northern Gaza.

Frustrated by Israel’s failure to defeat Hamas, senior officers want to erase any last traces of protections for civilians. In contrast to these Israeli military tactics, Hamas's ascendency toward leadership of the Palestinian national movement is bound to herald new cycles of violence and new major military operations -- and with it, another long chapter in the decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Despite the pall of gloom that underlines the lives of those whose families and neighbours have been killed, and the blanket dispossessions, evictions, killings, injuries caused, denial to relief, food, and a roof over their heads, the people remain hopeful. Stories of victories against the IDF, a vastly superior military force are being told. That, in turn, sparks rays of hope.

A devastating ambush in Gaza’s Jabalia saw an Israerli Defence Forces (IDF) tank explode in a deadly counterstrike by Hamas, leaving three Israeli soldiers dead and one injured. Hezbollah unleashed chaos on northern Israel, firing over 120 rockets and launching 15 strikes in just 24 hours. With heavy casualties reported, Israel’s arrogant terrorist force (IDF) remains on high alert, facing drone infiltrations and relentless bombardment.

Leadership decapitations, better known as “targeted killings” have become one face of Israel’s castigatory actions against Palestinian leaders. Steven David, Professor of International Relations and Security issues found that during the Second Intifada (2000–2005), Israel embarked on such operations more than any time in its history to slow down further terrorist attacks against Israelis.

Decapitations are also intended to exploit the violent and clandestine nature of terrorist groups, making leadership succession challenging and deterring others from assuming power. The argument would hypothesize that a consistent policy of targeted assassinations against leaders of terrorist groups that recruit, organize, and carry out attacks against Israeli targets would raise the cost of violence and force existing or potential militants to abandon the struggle or change tactics.

Yet, decapitation strikes have rarely been the silver bullet against terrorist organizations, and irrespective of the normative and legalistic questions surrounding the practice, on-the-ground reality rejects the notion that removing enemy leaders can, on its own, help achieve a state’s military and political goals. High-value targeting is futile and inexpedient at worst.

Hamas has been scarred but is euphoric that they did not face defeat at the hands of Israel. They know that they will regroup in larger numbers and with furious violence by the next decade. This generation has grown seeing their siblings, mothers, and fathers dying. Amos Oz, an Israeli writer, novelist, journalist, and intellectual once asserted the celebrated Israeli author, “Hamas is an idea…No idea has ever been defeated by force - not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads, and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one”.

Following October 7, 2023, the deadliest single day for world Jewry since the Holocaust, the war in Gaza shows few signs of abating. The intervening months have been marked by widespread death, destruction, civilian displacement, hunger, and disease. The Palestinians and Lebanese have paid a high price. Israel’s key identified aim -the complete elimination of Hamas -remains an elusive prospect.

By contrast, Palestinians are persuaded that Gaza may be in ruins. They will rise up and rebuild. Hamas’ ongoing resilience is a function of ideological factors that have historically proven to challenge Israeli counterterrorism efforts and defy easy solutions.

A new strategy, referred to as “Generals’ Plan” will now convert an area in “northern Gaza” into an official, industrial-scale extermination camp. The plan, published by a group of influential military reservists, involves giving some 400,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza a week to flee southwards. Anyone left will be starved to death or executed.

"I'm not sure that it will really defeat Hamas," said Michael Milshtein, the Head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. He added: "And of course, it won't bring the release of the hostages."

So where lies the hope for an end to the war? The resistance is spreading globally. Britain announced new sanctions against three "illegal settler outposts" and four groups accused of committing violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Their rationale is that the Israeli government inaction has allowed an environment of impunity to flourish where settler violence has been allowed to increase unchecked. Other countries that have adopted similar restrictions on Israel include the US, UK, France, Japan and Canada.

An article on a leading American medical journal’s willful ignorance of Nazi atrocities in the 1930s and ’40s found that the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the longest-running and most prestigious medical publications, either chose not to cover the Nazi regime’s racist and antisemitic health policies, mass killings, and medical experimentation.

A recent symposium where authors, Joelle M. Abi-Rached and Allan M. Brandt addressed the participants was strident in the critique of the situation. Abi-Rached called out the journal to: “Is the silence of the journal regarding the pulverization of the health care system in Gaza, and Israel’s relentless attack on health care workers and the creation of a public health and humanitarian disaster and the weaponization of starvation similar or different to its silence during the Holocaust?...“What explains the erasure of the predicament of Palestinians in the pages of the journal? Abi-Rached cautioned that the destruction in Gaza is a part of “a significant erosion” of the international humanitarian laws and framework born out of World War II and after the atrocities of Holocaust.

Abi-Rachid further probes: “Is the unfolding war part of the expansion of Eretz Israel, with more and more illegal settlements, driven by the messianism of the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu?” The enduring trauma of the Holocaust lingers generations later, with a disturbing transference of hate of Nazis onto hate of ‘Arabs’ who had nothing to do with the Holocaust in the first place.

Israel had never designed Hamas as a counterweight to Fatah and the PLO. For decades before, Born of the “organizational womb” of the Muslim Brotherhood, it had been active in social and spiritual actions and evolved into a militant fighting force much later with a fiercer occupation taking over Palestine.

A year of fighting has already changed the physical and demographic map of Gaza. For Israel, there must be a national soul-searching to identify whether Israel as a society truly understands the regional environment, both in terms of fighting its enemies and of building relations with its partners.

Ranjan Solomon is a well known peace activist who has closely tracked the Palestinian crisis. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.

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RANJAN SOLOMON