Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Palestinians to leave Gaza Strip on Saturday and said the army will turn Hamas sites “into rubble.”
“We will turn all the places in which Hamas is based … all the places Hamas is hiding in, acting from into rubble,” Netanyahu said in a televised address.
He called on Palestinians in the area to “leave now.”
Implementing the threats, and signaling their intent to commit war crimes, other Israeli leaders provided more details. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant:
"I ordered a complete siege of the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We fight against human animals and act accordingly."
Responding to the threat, Gaza factions' leaders said that Tel Aviv will be attacked and asked people there to leave. This is why Netanyahu's use of the words "Leave now" will come back to haunt the Israelis. Because those who can leave will leave, and that will be mostly Israelis, not Palestinians.
Given that Gazans have been under siege and with no place to go, asking them to leave or face death under the rubble is not an option between two things, it is a single option: die under the ruble.
The dramatic events that started on Saturday morning are not completely a surprise. For weeks, Hamas and other factions have been conducting live ammunition drills practicing the very same actions they took on Saturday. The Israeli leaders claimed, then, that the war games were designed to attract outside support and funding and doubted the groups’ ability to carry out attacks outside Gaza. On Saturday, those drills were put in action with deadly precision.
All this marks a new cycle of violence that could have been avoided any time over the past 50 years at least. For nearly 30 years since the Oslo agreement that promoted the two state solutions did not go anywhere. It merely created a Palestinian security apparatus in the West Bank that freed Israeli troops from patrolling Palestinian towns. Meanwhile, Israeli leaders continued the funding of illegal settlements making it impossible for the two state solution to remain viable. In the last decade, Israel has been ruled by increasingly right-wing factions hostile to any deal with the Palestinians. The lack of hope brings despair and desperate people do unimaginable things.
The chinese government seems to see the occupation to be the problem and ending it as the path to a solution.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry called for the creation of the state of Palestine. The ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning voiced "concerns about the escalation of the conflict" and condemned the "damage to civilians" but said that "the fundamental path out of the conflict lies through the implementation of a two-state solution and the creation of an independent State of Palestine."
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