Eurasia Press & News
My family is experiencing what they say is ‘the worst stage of genocide’ as Israel attempts to empty and annex northern Gaza.
Jabalia Refugee Camp in northern Gaza, where I was born and raised, has been facing relentless, indiscriminate Israeli bombing, targeting concentrations of displaced Palestinians.
Entire neighbourhoods have been razed to the ground. Torn bodies are bleeding to death in the streets or amongst the rubble while paramedics and firefighters are denied safe passage to evacuate the killed and injured.
The remaining survivors in my family there have been displaced multiple times, with some of them besieged inside their homes under heavy and constant bombardment. They are dispersed, dispossessed and grieving their losses while expecting to be the next victim of Israel’s killing machines at any moment.
My family have been experiencing what they describe as “the worst stage of genocide”. This is contrary to the misleading news of Israel classifying Gaza as a “secondary battleground” and shifting most of its military resources to fight Hezbollah on its northern front in Lebanon.
It feels like genocide is being repeated all over again, but on a wider scale and at a faster pace, undeterred and unlimited to any boundaries.
Nearly half a million Palestinian refugees have remained north of the Gaza Valley, resisting Israel’s criminal “evacuation” orders — the forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians which re-escalated soon after 7 October 2023.
Those refugees include most of my uncles, aunts, cousins and their children, dear neighbours, teachers and childhood friends. They refused to follow Israel’s orders to “head south” because the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 and uninterrupted violence that shaped their lives ever since taught them that perceived temporary displacement can become a permanent reality.
Israel’s collective punishment which they have been enduring for resisting forced displacement, leaves me at loss for words to give justice to its gruesome and apocalyptic nature.
Siege
Earlier this month, on 5 October, for the third time since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, Israeli forces imposed a siege on northern Gaza, including the areas of Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, Jabalia Refugee Camp and Jabalia Town, completely segregating it from the south.
Since 1 October they have also cut off all humanitarian supplies to the north, leaving people to die if not by bombs, then by forced starvation.
This brutal siege is part of the “Generals’ plan” which would, if successful, “change the reality” on the ground in Gaza, as reportedly described by retired Israeli General Giora Eiland. He has envisioned emptying northern Gaza of civilians and starving out or killing anyone who stays as a legitimate “target”.
While Israeli media are publicly speaking about Israel’s ambitions to empty and annex northern Gaza, Western media continue to repeat its official talking lines, presenting this third major invasion of the area in terms of “self-defence” to eliminate the regrouped Palestinian resistance.
Last month, in a closed meeting between members of the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Eiland proposed this siege plan as an “effective military tactic” to “destroy Hamas”. “What matters to [recently assassinated Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar is land and dignity, and with this manoeuvre, you take away both land and dignity”, he said.
This “Generals’ Plan” is now playing itself out for people in northern Gaza, including the surviving members of my family.
Unimaginable times
In my previous article for Declassified, I reported Israel’s killing of my cousin Yousef on 1 November 2023, for whom we continue to grieve amid the consistent shrinking of my extended family.
In an unanticipated turn of events, however, Yousef’s younger brother Wasim and his wife Mona welcomed their first baby on 7 October 2024 amid this recent siege on northern Gaza. They called their newborn boy Yousef, insisting on his memory as a reminder of our people’s desire to live and determination to ensure justice, freedom and dignity for future generations.
Baby Yousef arrived during unimaginable times that led to the displacement of his family twice in the span of one week.
He is one of 22 relatives now crammed together in a partially destroyed house in Gaza City that was left abandoned by its original owners.
With no access to clean water, food or other necessities of survival, Mona’s wounds from the birth of Yousef are not healing, causing inflammations, extreme pain and breastfeeding difficulties.
Her stitches from birth keep reopening because of malnutrition and lack of sanitation and medical care.
Israeli drones
Amidst anxiety over the survival of Mona and the newborn baby, an eight year-old cousin, Ilyas, sustained severe injuries in the Beach Camp, located along the Mediterranean Sea coastline in northern Gaza.
Shortly after escaping Jabalia Refugee Camp to what they hoped would be a safer place, an Israeli drone targeted Ilyas while playing marbles with other children in Beach Camp, leaving five killed, most of whom were children and elderly people.
Despite Ilyas’ critical physical condition and mental health, he was released from Gaza’s Al-Ahli Baptist hospital four days later as the facility is increasingly overwhelmed with a constant flood of injured people amid Israel’s mounting atrocities.
The burden on Ilyas’ family doesn’t end here. Ilyas is the youngest brother of Abood Abusalama, one of my closest cousins who has been tirelessly working from northern Gaza as a frontline reporter. At times, he has been my only channel of communication with family survivors when Israel cuts off telecommunications.
Abood has been busy documenting atrocities that didn’t spare children of his own family or his colleagues.
Targeting journalists
This latest ethnic cleansing campaign on Jabalia has been accompanied by escalating and deliberate targeting of journalists in northern Gaza, showing that Israel wants to suppress the truth about what is happening.
In a single day, 9 October, Abood documented Israel’s killing of Mohamed al-Tanani, a cameraman for Al-Aqsa TV, and the maiming of his colleague Tamer Lubbad and Fadi al-Wahidi, a cameraman for Al Jazeera Arabic.
Despite constant risks, he continues to do what he deems a duty towards his people, who have been practically abandoned by the international community, particularly Western mainstream media which continue to offer lip service to Israel’s mounting crimes.
In a report published in September, Gaza’s health ministry released information on 34,344 Palestinians killed in attacks by Israeli forces between October 2023 and 31 August this year, in a continuously rising death toll that has now surpassed 42,500.
Some 11,300 of out of the more than 14,100 children killed were also identified, 20 percent of whom were born and killed during the genocide.
If we follow the logic presented by the July 2024 Lancet report, the real number of deaths could have exceeded 200,000 by now.
Systematic elimination
It has never been as crystal clear that Israel is systematically eliminating the Palestinians from their land under the rubric of eliminating Hamas.
Even as Israel proclaimed “victory” for the elimination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the southern district of Rafah, and allies from the US to the UK and Germany rushed to offer their congratulations, news of endless massacres continued to flood in from northern Gaza.
“Israel is systematically eliminating the Palestinians from their land under the rubric of eliminating Hamas”As genocide continues to accelerate and claim more innocent lives with each passing day, it seems as if Israel has concluded that the only way to exist as a settler-colonial and apartheid state is through perpetual mass extermination and devastation of the Palestinian people, and any Arab opposition.
Israel cannot expect to get away with committing a genocide against a whole people they have repeatedly dispossessed, occupied and demeaned since their existence on their ethnic cleansing, with no consequences.
This genocide, often described as the most-televised genocide in history, will be imprinted in the minds of generations to come, and that is not limited to the Palestinians, but will include every person of conscience. Oppression breeds resistance, and such unprecedented terror can only be met by a more determined resistance.
