Israel 'Already Lost' Gaza Battle Even Before Eviction Plan Leaked - Journo
18:47 GMT 01.11.2023 (Updated: 09:23 GMT 05.12.2023)
© AP Photo / Ahmed Hatem
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Israel’s all-out attack on the Gaza Strip, which has killed nearly 9,000 people, as well as its leaked plans to evict the territory’s entire population, are happening because the country is in denial about having already lost the struggle with Hamas and other Palestinian groups, a journalist told Sputnik.
On Tuesday, Israeli media reported that the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, which is equivalent to the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), had drawn up a plan to completely relocate all 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip to Egypt.
The proposal, created on October 13, suggests pushing all Gaza residents across the border into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, where tent cities will be established, followed by the construction of permanent cities. It would create a “humanitarian corridor” of an undefined nature, as well as a security zone on the Israeli side of the border to prevent Palestinians from returning to Israeli territory.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dismissed the outrage over the report, saying it was nothing more than a “concept paper” or hypothetical exercise and that the ministry has no power to suggest policy in Jerusalem. However, the Israeli Defense Ministry has already ordered more than 1 million Gazans to leave the northern half of the Gaza Strip as it prepares for an all-out attack on Gaza City, where it expects to meet Hamas in a decisive battle that will destroy the organization. Hamas has governed the Gaza Strip since it won elections in 2006, and its militants helped carry out a cross-border raid on October 7 that killed more than 1,300 Israelis.
In response to the news, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova urged that “we are talking about millions of civilians.”
“Everyone is exhausted: Israelis, Palestinians, neighbors in the region, sympathizers of both around the world,” she said. “And why? But because one country judged itself as having the right to decide the destinies of millions according to its own plans. And when such an approach led absolutely everyone to a dead end, it turned out that the United States did not bear any responsibility for what it had done. It's Halloween for them.”
“It's clear that it is an intentional leak,” Laith Marouf, award-winning broadcaster and journalist based in Beirut, Lebanon, told Radio Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Tuesday. “It is trying to normalize, within the Western audience, this concept of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their land. So we have to sometimes be wary when these leaks come out and understand that they were intentionally released.”
1 November 2023, 17:10 GMT
“Until now, without removing the Palestinians of Gaza, out of Gaza, the Israelis have already killed upwards of 12,000 - because there's 2,000 people under the rubble - and have displaced a million-and-a-half people inside Gaza. So the number of displaced Palestinians in this war has surpassed the number of displaced Palestinians in 1948 - because in 1948, the Israelis expelled, removed 800,000 Palestinians. Now, we're past that number and we're approaching very fast the number of Palestinians that the Israelis massacred in 1948: 15,000 dead.”
“So you have to understand that this is already a second ‘Nakba’, a second catastrophe, for the Palestinians that could be bigger than the first one. And people are seeing this happening live on television this time, so there is no way anybody can deny that this has happened. And there is nobody in the West - in terms of authorities, regimes, governments, institutions - that wants to even stop this, they are all actually finding reasons to allow more of this to happen. Therefore, the only thing that the Palestinian people can do is the same thing that they've always had to do: stand up for their rights and fight back the oppressor, the genocider, the occupier or the colonizer and who is behind them.”
“You see, yesterday President Putin made a statement that I think is the most severe statement that we've heard from a Russian president ever, when he said that the Palestinians are fighting and the reason the Palestinians are being killed is because [of] the governments that are behind Israel, and that Russia is fighting those people in Ukraine right now. So this is aligning, right now, Russia's future and its battle [in Ukraine] with the battle of the Palestinian people against the Zionists and the imperialists behind them,” Marouf said.
“And, you know, we are entering right now a stage that is different. And of course, everybody's waiting for Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s speech, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, on Friday, to show us what's the next chapter in this battle. But nothing's going to stop, no war is going to stop, the Americans are not going to stop the Zionists from committing this genocide and therefore, be prepared for what's next.”
Recently in an interview with US-based media, Vijay Prashad, the executive director of the Tricontinental Institute think tank, said that soon, the outrage across the Middle East over Israel’s war in Gaza would reach such great heights that their own governments “will not be able to contain their population.”
1 November 2023, 16:23 GMT
“The populations are going to be on the street, furious, if we watch the Israelis massacre Palestinian civilians - not 500 a day, 800 a day, but 10,000 a day, 15,000 a day, that is going to be something the Arab populations won’t stand for,” he said, describing the potential for the Israeli invasion of Gaza to become as brutal as the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, which at the time was controlled by Daesh*.
Marouf said he thought Prashad’s analysis to be “accurate,” predicting “a total regional war” by the end of the week, due to recent developments.
“I mean, just today, Yemen declared war on the Zionist colony [Israel] and flew tens of guided missiles, cruise missiles, drones on to hit the Zionist colony and they hit their targets. So we already have one country, a state, actually declaring war on the Zionist colony and others will follow soon. I mean, I believe by Friday we will be in a total regional war if the Zionists don't back up now in fear of what's going to happen.”
“Yesterday the Germans sent in destroyers that are now on the coast of Lebanon and they sent a letter from the Embassy of Germany to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lebanon saying that ‘our troops are going to land in Lebanon’ without asking for permission. So we are getting to a point of direct occupations and direct colonization by European powers. And this is not going to stand, you know? I think most of the people here in Lebanon right now are waiting to see which ship within the imperialist armada that has been gathered on our shores here is going to sink first,” Marouf noted.
“By the way, this is the largest armada of ships to have been assembled since 1945. It's like 40, 50-somewhat warships right now across the coast of Lebanon and Palestine. That means we haven't seen this number of warships since World War Two. We are already in World War Three. And I tell you, everybody wants the German ship to be the first sunk, you know, because Palestinians have carried the weight of the crimes of German Nazis against the Jewish Europeans for 75 years. And we're sick of that. We don't want to carry the weight of the Holocaust perpetrated by Europeans on us anymore.”
Marouf noted that within the Western media and the upper echelons of political power, the language with which they can speak about the conflict is tightly controlled.
30 October 2023, 16:01 GMT
“Its directives come from one side, then all the leaders line up, repeating, parroting what the ‘emperor’ in DC says, and all of the media copy-pastes from those statements and publishes them as good propaganda agents,” he told Sputnik. “So, everything is very clear now: there is no sovereignty for any European state, Israel itself is not sovereign anymore, there's thousands of of Canadian, American, British, French, Italian, German troops on the ground in Palestine, more Western troops on the ground than than the the core of the Israeli military, if we don't count their reserves. So Israel has ceded its sovereignty the minute this war started because they already lost the war.”
“And so, you know, partially, I would agree Netanyahu has already lost the war. Israel has already lost the war against the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and they don't want to admit it. And they think that killing civilians will somehow give them a modicum of a win somehow,” he said.
“And as we saw today, the Israelis attempted for the fifth time to enter Gaza by land and they again got clobbered. And as a response, the Israelis not only bombed the only cancer hospital, they also bombed a refugee camp with one of the biggest bombs ever deployed. And in one hit, they took down 40 buildings in one bomb, 600-plus massacred civilians. It's almost the number [of dead] of a few days ago when they attacked the Baptist hospital.”
“So the Israelis have lost this battle, they don't want to admit it, and they want to continue with genocide to feel like they have done something,” Marouf stated. “And of course, the Americans are letting them do that because America cannot also admit that its own forces that have been leading this war since October 7 have already also been defeated.”
*Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS) is a terrorist organization outlawed in Russia and many other states.
