Israel has deliberately made northern Gaza unlivable, say Palestinians. What comes next?

Israeli attacks have created deplorable conditions across Gaza, but humanitarian groups say the month-long siege of towns in the north have essentially rendered the area unlivable.

And they accuse Israel’s military of inflicting starvation and destruction to ensure hundreds of thousands of Palestinians can never return to their homes.

In the Yarmouk sports stadium in Gaza City, which has been converted into a sprawling sea of tents for those who’ve fled from the besieged northern areas, every person a videographer working for CBC News spoke to described inhumane conditions.

“It’s not just the war that is exhausting us. It’s the hunger that hurts us the most,” said Hashem Yehia el Laham, a 63-year-old father of seven. 

“Today, people are dying of hunger. There is no food, no water, no clothes and no home,” he said. “This is a genocide.”

On Oct. 5, Israel Defense Forces surrounded the northern town of Jabalia, alleging Hamas militants had regrouped and were using the town as a base, and that it was necessary for the IDF to move in to dismantle them.

In the days that followed, the IDF told residents to leave and move south, as it worked to destroy most of the roads leading out of the area. Night after night, the IDF subjected communities there to attacks from the air. 

The extent of civilian casualties during the ongoing operation is unclear. But last week, in two days alone, UNICEF said Israeli bombing in Jabalia killed 50 Palestinian children.

Damaged infrastructure

Dr. Abu Mughaiseb, a deputy medical co-ordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, told CBC News he receives daily reports from his staff about patients fleeing towns such as Jabalia.

“When you see that infrastructure is destroyed on purpose…. I mean, the [attacks on] infrastructure, the water pipelines, are not Hamas, sorry to say this. The sewage system is not Hamas, the hospitals are not Hamas … Everything is destroyed. It means that you don’t want the population to be able to live,” said Mughaiseb.

In a statement, MSF said that for the first three weeks of October, Israel only facilitated six per cent of co-ordinated aid movements from the south — where much of the limited aid enters — to northern Gaza.

The group said the trickle of life-supporting goods makes it impossible to provide humanitarian support, even as the situation deteriorates. 

Israeli human rights groups were the first to raise the alarm that the IDF appeared to be implementing provisions of the “Generals’ Plan.” 

Submitted to the Israeli Knesset in September by a group of retired IDF generals and officers, the plan proposed a series of extreme measures to pressure Hamas into releasing Israeli hostages captured on Oct. 7, 2023. An estimated 100 hostages remain in Gaza.

The plan, claim the human rights groups, calls for a complete blockade of northern areas of Gaza, including stopping aid deliveries, along with the forcible depopulation and potential starvation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

IDF insists it ‘minimizes’ harm

In a statement emailed to CBC News, that it is “taking numerous measures to minimize harm to civilians, including warning the population and removing non-involved people from combat zones.” The statement insisted that preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes “does not reflect the IDF’s objectives” and that it will allow humanitarian aid into the north. 

Aid groups attempting to operate in the area, however, offer a much more damning depiction of Israel’s actions.

Earlier this week, 15 United Nations and humanitarian organizations characterized the situation in Gaza’s north as “apocalyptic.” They accused Israel’s government of denying or withholding “basic aid” and “life-saving supplies” to Palestinians who either won’t leave or can’t leave the area.

The entire population of the north is at “imminent risk of dying, from disease, famine and violence,” said their statement.

Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, just returned from an extensive trip to Gaza and told BBC Radio the situation in the north is akin to a “besiegement within a besiegement.”

“This is not self-defence,” he said. “This is the systematic destruction of Gaza.”

Questions about Gaza resettlement

Two weeks ago, U.S. officials reportedly pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to confirm his forces were not laying siege to the north — reassurances Netanyahu has thus far refused to give in public.

The left-leaning Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz spelled out the probable situation in an editorial titled, “If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is.”

The UN regards ethnic cleaning as a possible component of a crime against humanity, which could potentially fall within the scope of the Genocide Convention. 

The Israeli NGO Peace Now also said this week that the evidence it has seen has convinced its members that “horrific war crimes are being committed in Gaza.” 

Peace Now says it believes the ultimate aim is to drive the Palestinian population out and establish Jewish settlements in the territory — something that would be illegal under international law. 

For humanitarian advocates, Israel’s conduct in northern Gaza represents another example of how the Netanyahu government is allowed to escape accountability.

“All we see is a lot of hand-wringing on the part of member states of the United Nations,” said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian Canadian human rights lawyer based in Haifa, Israel, told CBC News. “But we don’t actually see any international action to stop Israel.” 

‘We can see that Netanyahu has a plan’

Many members of far-right Jewish settlers groups and political parties have openly advocated stripping Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank of their land as punishment for Hamas’s attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, which killed an estimated 1,200 people.

Last month, prominent settler groups, which included dozens of Knesset members from Netanyahu’s governing party as well as several powerful cabinet members, held a second conference to discuss taking over parts of Gaza to create Israeli settlements. They articulated a vision of Jewish settlements along the length and breadth of Gaza, with the current Palestinian population removed. 

“We can see that Netanyahu has a plan,” said Buttu. “[The government is] talking about re-establishing settlements in the north. They’ve already announced that they’ve divided Gaza into two, and I fully expect that they’re going to re-build settlements.”

Before 2005, Israeli settlers had created more than 20 settlements in Gaza, but Israel unilaterally dismantled them and relocated the Jewish population.

Eran Etzion, a former senior Israeli security official, said that while Netanyahu has publicly rejected the prospect of resettling Gaza, he has done little to dissuade members of his party from pushing their own agenda, most notably Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

“After the elimination of the [Hamas] terrorists and the evacuation of the civilians will be the reinstatement of settlements, according to Smotrich and Ben-Gvir,” Etzion told CBC News. 

Muted reaction in Israel

He says Netanyahu requires the support of those far-right ministers to stay in power, but also needs military support from the U.S., which has publicly stated it is opposed to Jewish settlements in Gaza.

“What is Netanyahu’s real plan regarding northern Gaza? It’s hard to say. [His] real plan is to perpetuate the war in order to perpetuate his rule,” said Etzion.

Aside from the human rights groups who raised alarm over the IDF’s actions in northern Gaza, inside Israel reaction to the ethnic cleansing accusations has been muted.

“There’s simply no [media] coverage and therefore there is no understanding of what is actually going on. That’s number one,” said Etzion.

“Number two, there is a very deep sense [that the military action] is justified … [The thinking is,] we must defend ourselves and in order to defend ourselves, we need to take military actions.… and there will be innocent civilians that can get hurt in the process.”