Excerpts w/emphasis added:
“Since we already encircled the northern part of Gaza in the past nine or 10 months, what we should do is the following thing to tell all the 300,000 residents [that the UN estimates is 400,000] who still live in the northern part of Gaza that they have to leave this area and they should be given 10 days to leave through safe corridors that Israel will provide.
“And after that time, all this area will become to be a military zone. And all the Hamas people will still, though, whether some of them are fighters, some of them are civilians… will have two choices either to surrender or to starve.”
Eiland wants Israel to seal the areas once the evacuation corridors are closed. Anyone left behind would be treated as an enemy combatant. The area would be under siege, with the army blocking all supplies of food, water or other necessities of life from going in.
…
It is not clear whether the IDF has adopted the Generals’ Plan in part or in full, but the circumstantial evidence of what is being done in Gaza suggests it is at the very least a strong influence on the tactics being used against the population. The BBC submitted a list of questions to the IDF, which were not answered.
The ultra-nationalist extremists in Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet want to replace Palestinians in northern Gaza with Jewish settlers. Among many statements he’s made on the subject, the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has said “Our heroic fighters and soldiers are destroying the evil of Hamas, and we will occupy the Gaza Strip… to tell the truth, where there is no settlement, there is no security.”
This is a narrative that’s spread by Hamas to discourage civilians from leaving combat areas in an effort to maximize civilian casualties which helps their propaganda efforts.
This is the framing of information warfare. There are no facts, no truths, only “narratives” that are deployed by adversarial actors.
In such a framing, it doesn’t matter whether the IDF ordering the displacement of 400k people is legal, legitimate, suspect, in good faith or in furtherance of ethnic cleansing. All that matters is whose narrative dominates the information space.
This framing already gives up on debate. Your response does not refute anything I wrote, does not engage with anything. You just labelled my argument a terrorist narrative and you’re done. You’ve counterbalanced the “narrative”.
But, my brother in Lemmy, even we were to accept that Hamas is saying this for this reason, can’t you see that it’s based on exactly the legitimate fear and reasonable expectation of Palestinian civilians that Israel is NOT a trustworthy, humanitarian actor here? The Hamas propaganda would not have a leg to stand on if it weren’t for 30 years of illegal settlement in the West Bank and for the Israeli governing coalition not being dependent on the fascist right.