israel's goal in gaza is being achieved: total destruction of all that's there including its inhabitants;

The New York Times today published an interactive feature titled “Gaza After Nine Weeks of War”, which shows “before” and “after” satellite imagery that provides a glimpse into the sheer scale of the destruction that the Israeli military has been wreaking in the Gaza Strip with openly genocidal intent.

Gaza must be made unhabitable. That is the transparent goal of Israel’s military operation, described by the Times as “one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the 21st century”, and the Palestinians are being delivered the message in no uncertain terms that they can either flee across the border into Egypt to live as refugees in tent cities in the Sinai desert, or they can die.

Of course, there really is no choice for the Palestinians. There were first told to flee the north of Gaza to the south while Israel was also bombing the south. Now Israel has told them to flee the south, too, and they have nowhere else to go.

Egypt has refused to allow a flow of Palestinian refugees through the Rafah crossing because Egypt refuses to accept responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe that Israel has created. The choice Palestinians are left with is to remain in Gaza and perish, whether from the indiscriminate bombing, from lack of potable water, from lack of nutrition, or from disease.

The title of the New York Times’ feature is misleading since the word “war” conjures up the idea of opposing military forces fighting each other, but that is not what has been happening in Gaza. The stateless Palestinians living in what then head of Israel’s National Security Council Giora Eiland described in 2004 as a “huge concentration camp” have no military.

There are armed militias in Gaza like Hamas, whose members may equip themselves with such weapons as AK-47 rifles, hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenades, and crude rockets with no precise targeting capability. But Palestinians have no tanks or other more advanced weaponry that people associate with the idea of a “war” between two military powers. They have no navy. They have no air force, no fighter jets, no bombers, no attack helicopters, no missile defense systems. While militant groups in Gaza have a non-zero capacity to put up armed resistance to Israel’s ground operations, the civilian population of Gaza is essentially defenseless.

The Israeli military, by contrast, is ranked among the most powerful in the world. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are equipped with modern artillery, howitzers, guided missiles, multiple rocket launchers, armored vehicles, tanks, combat armored bulldozers, warplanes, combat helicopters, and warships. The IDF’s arsenal includes US-supplied F-16, F-15, and F-35 fighter aircraft, and Cobra and Apache attack helicopters.

In short, what the world is witnessing is not a “war”, as the headlines and TV news title overlays proclaim. It is not two states having it out with their respective armies. It is a campaign of death and destruction being waged by an Occupying Power armed with one of the most powerful militaries in the world against the defenseless civilian population confined within the Gaza concentration camp.

It is not “war”. It is genocide........more......