‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 7: Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing underway in Gaza

Israel is preparing to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its northern residents. Early on Friday, October 13, Israel ordered the United Nations that it should start evacuating the 1.1 million Palestinians who live in northern Gaza, including Gaza City and North Gaza. The UN has stated that moving over a million civilians in under 24 hours was “impossible” without devastating humanitarian consequences and that the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip had reached “lethal lows.”

Israel’s directive to the UN was accompanied by a campaign of psychological warfare on the people of Gaza. Mondoweiss Gaza correspondent Tareq Hajjaj, who is based in Gaza City, reported that the Israeli army was dropping leaflets on neighborhoods, ordering residents to leave their homes and flee to the south.

This campaign aims to sow panic and fear among the people of Gaza so that they will flee and leave the area in the service of two objectives — one military and the other political. The military objective is to separate the Palestinian resistance from its popular base so that Israel can isolate and eradicate it, and the political objective is to realize a new phase in the Zionist colonial project, which is to ethnically cleanse yet another part of Palestine and expand its territory into Gaza.

Massacres and psychological warfare

This campaign of psychological warfare is being backed up by action, as Israel has dropped over 6,000 bombs on Gaza in the last 6 days, nearly matching the number of U.S. bombs dropped in Afghanistan within a single year. The intentional campaign of indiscriminate airstrikes is leading to massacres of entire families and the leveling of entire neighborhoods. The Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that the number of Palestinians killed in airstrikes reached 1,799, with 6,388 injured. The vast majority are civilians, and a third of the martyrs are children.

Human Rights Watch has confirmed Israel’s use of white phosphorus in both Gaza and Lebanon, which the organization confirmed through eyewitness accounts and video evidence that shows “multiple airbursts of artillery-fired white phosphorus over the Gaza City port and two rural locations along the Israel-Lebanon border.” According to HRW, white phosphorus is an incendiary weapon used to burn objects and people in wide areas, and its use in densely populated areas like Gaza is considered illegal under international humanitarian law.

The Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, announced that 13 of the Israeli prisoners in Gaza were also killed by Israel’s indiscriminate airstrikes during the past 24 hours alone. According to the Hamas English-language Telegram channel, “6 of them were killed in the North Governorate in two separate places, and 7 in the Gaza Governorate in 3 different places that were affected by the barbaric Israeli bombing.”

The Qassam Brigades also released a video Friday evening, first displaying a sentence that read, “These are scenes of the Qassam fighters’ treatment of children during the battles in Kibbutz Holit during the first day of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation,” before continuing to feature short clips of masked Hamas fighters carrying and tending to Israeli children.

Also on Friday, massive demonstrations took place across occupied Palestine and the Arab world in support of Gaza, the Palestinian resistance, and in rejection of Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Jordan, Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and Palestine. Protests were also reported in Germany and France, with more demonstrations expected to take place in the United States. 

Fears of a second Nakba

The Israeli evacuation orders are reminiscent of the Zionist “radio broadcasts” of 1948 that contributed to the Nakba, terrorizing Palestinians into fleeing from their homes for fear that they would fall victim to Zionist massacres, such as those that Zionist forces perpetrated throughout 1948. Most notably, the current evacuation orders by the Israeli army have instructed Palestinians not to return to Gaza until it gives them permission — the same orders that were given in 1948 before the Nakba when Palestinian refugees attempted to return to their homes after the war of 1948 were prevented and shot on sight and labeled as “infiltrators” by the nascent Israeli state.

This order has stoked fears among Gaza’s population of an impending expulsion operation. While many have begun to flee to the south, many others in northern Gaza are refusing to leave their homes, knowing that this might spell their permanent ethnic cleansing from their lands. The vast majority of Gaza’s population are refugees or descendants of refugees from 1948, and the memory of how the Nakba took place is ingrained in the psyche of many Palestinians across generations.

Seventy-seven percent of Gaza’s population are refugees, expelled from their homelands by Israel in the 1948 Nakba. Among the areas of the northern West Bank that have been ordered to be evacuated are two of Gaza’s eight refugee camps, where hundreds of thousands of refugees live.

Images coming out of Gaza on Friday of Palestinian families fleeing on foot with their belongings in their hands and on their backs bore a stark resemblance to the images of Palestinians being forced out of their homes by Zionist militias 75 years ago.

‘Day of Rage’ and armed resistance in West Bank and Jerusalem

Protests erupted across the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, as well as in parts of ‘48 Palestine, as Palestinians took to the streets to demonstrate in support of the Palestinian resistance and their people in Gaza.

On Thursday night, a number of confrontations were reported across the West Bank, with at least three Palestinians killed, including a Palestinian woman who witnesses say was shot while driving near a military base at the entrance to her town in Ramallah.

According to Palestinian media, confrontations were reported Thursday night in the Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah, and Qalqilya areas of the West Bank. Two Palestinians were shot and killed by Israeli forces. In Qalqilya in the northern West Bank, 17-year-old Muhthadi Majed Salim was killed in the town of Jayyus, and another unidentified Palestinian was killed in the town of al-Nabi Ilyas. In the Ramallah district, 37-year-old Randa Ajaj was shot and killed while she was driving with her son in the car, who was also injured. Ajaj was passing near an Israeli military post in the town of Yabrud in Ramallah. The circumstances surrounding her killing remained unclear.

In occupied Jerusalem, a Palestinian university student was shot and killed after he carried out a shooting operation in the Old City of Jerusalem, injuring two Israeli police officers. The young man, a resident of Jerusalem’s Beit Hanina, was identified as 20-year-old Khaled al-Muhtaseb, a student at Bethlehem University, who was reportedly involved in student politics and the leftist Marxist-Leninist bloc at the university.

In the afternoon following Friday prayers, Palestinians in areas across the West Bank engaged in clashes with Israeli forces, spanning Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem, and many other locations throughout the West Bank. The protests followed calls for a “Day of Rage” by national and Islamist forces in the West Bank. Dozens of injuries were reported by Palestinian health officials, with Israeli forces suppressing protests with tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, and live ammunition.

On the same day, deadly Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians were widely reported. In one widely publicized incident caught on video, an Israeli settler was seen shooting a young Palestinian man from point-blank range in the Palestinian village of Tuwani in Masafer Yatta, in the South Hebron Hills. He has been identified as Zakaria al-Arda.

Palestinian resistance groups in the West Bank also engaged in armed clashes with Israeli forces, concentrating resistance efforts in the areas surrounding illegal Israeli settlements and military checkpoints. Reports continue to stream in of armed clashes in different geographic areas, with a large portion of the reports coming in from the northern West Bank.

By 3:30 p.m., reports began to surface of many different armed groups launching armed attacks. The Tulkarem Brigade launched an attack on the Taybeh military base and other military checkpoints in the area. At around the same time, armed clashes were reported near the Huwwara military checkpoint, outside the northern West Bank town of Huwwara. In the Jenin area, the Jenin Brigade launched an attack on the illegal Israeli settlements of Meriav, Shaked, and Homesh. Armed clashes were also reported with Israeli forces in the city of Hebron in the southern West Bank.

As of 4:50 p.m., the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported that 9 Palestinians in the West Bank had been killed by Israeli forces and settlers on Friday alone. This brings the total death toll of Palestinians in the West Bank since the start of Operation “Flood of Al-Aqsa” last Saturday to 44.