Shortly after the start of Israeli assault on Gaza, which came in response to Hamas’s murderous Oct. 7 attack on its territory, Israel’s government claimed that its targeting of a major hospital in the north was justified because of the presence of an important command base secretly maintained there by its enemies.
Even long after most of the northern Gaza Strip had been pummeled into rubble and brought under the control of the Israeli army, no proof of anything resembling a major terrorist operations base has been shared with the world.
In the weeks that followed, as Israel’s offensive proceeded southward, reports of large-scale Palestinian casualties multiplied. As of the latest count, the number of deaths has been placed northward of 22,000 and is still climbing.
All the while, though, Israeli spokespeople have cast doubt on this accounting, saying that the real numbers are unknown and suggesting that the reported ones are unreliable because their main source has been the Hamas-operated Gaza Health Ministry. Even U.S. President Joe Biden gave this kind of skepticism a lift when he said he had “no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth”.
Then, nearly a month ago, came word from a report published in the Lancet, one of the world’s most highly respected medical journals, that a group of researchers had found no evidence of inflated mortality reporting.
As a columnist, I have felt the increasingly powerful tug of other topics. There’s the ongoing civil war in Sudan, which is almost certainly an even worse tragedy than Gaza in terms of loss of life. An important election was held last month in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of Africa’s most important countries and a land that has mostly spent the past few decades adrift.
It is this sort of thing that routinely gets underreported that attracted me to column-writing in the first place. If not quite as neglected, there is an election of major significance about to be held in Taiwan, the outcome of which may help determine global war and peace over the next decade in ways that are totally out of proportion with that small island’s size. In South America, also often overlooked, there is Venezuela’s increasingly open covetousness about its neighbor Guyana’s oil-rich territory and a fascinating recent election in Argentina.
Yet it would be wrong to turn one’s gaze away from events in Gaza prematurely. To do so would facilitate the task of the spin doctors on all sides and worsen our own callousness toward one of the worst human catastrophes the world has experienced in recent years.
As the conflict has dragged on and Israel has stepped up its military pressure against Gaza, it has found itself on the defensive on other fronts, most notably that of world opinion, with the United States increasingly isolated as one of the few countries willing to credit its accounts of what is happening on the ground there—and willing to defend Israel’s actions. Meanwhile, the reasons to doubt Israel’s explanations of its strategy and actions continue to multiply.
At various times, Israel has insisted, for example, that it has taken great care in its targeting to minimize death of civilians and damage to housing and basic infrastructure. Even for nonexperts, the more that time goes by, the harder this has become to reconcile with what our eyes have been telling us, as the images have rolled in showing what look like Dresden-level damage of broad and densely inhabited swaths of a territory only twice as large as Washington, D.C. Where apartment buildings once stood, there are now only heaps of detritus, which grieving and orphaned family members are left to sift through with their bare hands in search of whatever scraps of their old lives they can recover.
Three months into the war, detailed reporting on the destruction in Gaza has called into question the notion that Israel ever took serious precautions. It was recently revealed by a U.S. intelligence assessment that—despite Israel’s high-tech arsenal—much of the worst devastation unleashed on Gaza thus far was the result of U.S.-furnished unguided (or “dumb”) munitions, which had accounted for nearly half of the 29,000 bombs dropped on Gaza up to that point in the conflict.
Similar problems with Israel’s account of its offensive have arisen with its claims that it has generally avoided attacking the so-called safe zones within the enclave where it has told millions of displaced Gazans to move in order to stay out of harm’s way. CNN verified in December that the Israeli military had carried out three airstrikes against these zones.
I write these things because of a growing sense of trepidation about this conflict. This sense is not only what seems to me to be a well-justified fear that the casualties in Gaza will continue to mount strongly in the weeks and months ahead, but also that the world is, perhaps predictably, becoming inured to the tragedy.
My other big fear is that a mounting weariness with the seeming hopelessness of the situation in Gaza will only push things toward the worst kinds of outcomes. The one that I worry about most is that Israel’s continuing assault on the territory, with its accompanying constriction of humanitarian relief and mounting nutrition insecurity and health crises, will lead to a disguised expulsion of Palestinians from their land, producing nothing more than a morally fatigued shrug from the rest of the world.
I say “disguised” because Israel may be able to carry this out without rounding people up and physically pushing them over the border with Egypt, which has said that it will not accept a new wave of Palestinian refugees. At a certain point, the desperation created by famine and disease could achieve the same result.
The Biden administration has said that it opposes the expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and also rejects the idea of Israel assuming political and administrative control over the enclave, but the Biden team’s record of holding Israel to account on anything to do with this crisis is extremely weak, and its willingness to stand up to Israel by denying it military or political support still seems close to nil.
In Israel, in the meantime, there continues to be discussion among present and former officials about just this sort of “solution”—often using the euphemism “transfer”, though some in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party and coalition government have called outright for reducing Gaza’s population or even for a second Nakba—an Arabic word referring to the mass displacement of Palestinians after the creation of present-day Israel in 1948.
The world needs to say no to this and mean it. Clearing Palestinians en masse out of ever more of their land is just the kind of seductive-looking “fix” that is not only profoundly unjust, but will also only guarantee more hatred and tragedy in the future.
Howard W. French is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a longtime foreign correspondent. His latest book is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War.