Following the asymmetric punishment inflicted by Israel, all basic infrastructure, schools, mosques, hospitals and 80 per cent of Gaza’s buildings were reportedly razed by systematic aerial bombardments resulting in nearly 17,000 Palestinian civilian casualties. 7000 of them would be children and several thousand more buried in the rubble.
By Germán Gorraiz Lopez, political analyst
The real objective of the military campaign in Gaza would be to provoke a second nakba in which 1.5 million Palestinians would be forced to leave Gaza and turned into a mass of rubble and human remains that would make it impossible to return the displaced Gazan population.
To this end, Israel is attempting to confine the Palestinians to an outdoor concentration camp of 1.7 km2 located in Rafah, a situation described by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk as “apocalyptic”, while warning “of the growing risk of genocide”.
Such forcible confinement of the Gazan population would be a measure of pressure on Egypt to open its border and settle the Palestinians in the Sinai Peninsula, after which Israel would proceed to the unilateral declaration of sovereignty over Gaza and its maritime areas.
Thus, Israel would assume control of the maritime routes and exploration of the Gazan gas reserves that would be integrated into Israel’s offshore facilities and proceed with the construction of the Ben Gurion Canal.
This project, named after the founding father of the Israeli regime, David Ben Gurion, was conceived in the late 1960s to create an alternative route to the Suez Canal, the main maritime route connecting Europe and Asia, which would thus come under American Jewish control.
Then, in the second phase of the ethnic cleansing undertaken by Israel, we will see the expulsion of the Arab population from East Jerusalem and the unstoppable expansion of Israeli settler settlements in the West Bank, Ramallah remained a Palestinian islet in an ocean of Israeli colonies where an Abbas would languish until his death as a mere servant of Israel.
Consequently, the two-state theory will remain an impossible utopia given the absence on both sides of valid interlocutors to negotiate a lasting peace involving the mutual recognition of the States of Israel and Palestine.
By Germán Gorraiz Lopez, political analyst