‘You die here, or you leave’

‘Let’s for a minute imagine a world without Hamas,’ the surgeon-turned-satirist Bassem Youssef said to Piers Morgan on 17 October 2023. ‘What will this world look like? Let’s give this world a name, and let’s name this world the West Bank.’ On 28 August, Israel launched a ground and air attack on the northern West Bank, ‘the biggest of its kind since 2002’. As an editorial in Haaretz put it, ‘Israel has decided to turn the West Bank into the Gaza Strip.’

With the military onslaught came images of medical staff rounded up, hospitals besieged, ambulances and paramedics stopped, cities and refugee camps sealed off, roads destroyed, water, fuel and electricity supplies cut. Israeli occupation forces were reported to have killed twenty Palestinians in Jenin in two days. They took over people’s homes and positioned snipers on the roofs of buildings. Mass arrests and abuse of detainees were filmed by residents. The human rights organisation al-Haq has shown footage of the destruction of the eastern part of the city by Israeli bulldozers. Again, as in Gaza, the targets are mainly refugees of 1948 and 1967 and their descendants, in Jenin, al-Faraa and Nur Shams refugee camps.

In June, according to the Washington Institute, 41 per cent of West Bankers expressed support for Hamas, compared to 12 per cent the previous September. In July, Israeli authorities approved the largest seizures of occupied West Bank territory for decades, making 2024, according to the Israeli organisation Peace Now, ‘by far the peak year for Israeli land seizure in the West Bank’.

I have been told that men in Gaza are joining the armed resistance because ‘at least that way they will be fed.’ If the justification for the Israeli assault on Gaza and its young population was the destruction of Hamas, then that has quite clearly not only failed, but was fallacious from the outset. The intention becomes clearer by the minute. On 30 August, the Israeli government appointed a permanent governor for Gaza, ‘a chief Gaza officer’ for ‘years and years to come’.

The same day, Ahmed Tobasi, the creative director of the Jenin Freedom Theatre, described the situation in Jenin to Democracy Now:

You hear the drones very close. The vehicles all around, the bombing by time to time. It’s again the scene repeating itself again and again and we don’t know what is the end, how long it will go on, what we should do? Obviously, the Israelis want to tell the communities, the civilians of these areas, you have only two choices: you die here, or you leave.

According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, more than a thousand Palestinians in the West Bank have been forcibly evicted from their homes since last October, under cover of the war in Gaza. B’Tselem documented more than 130 incidents of settler violence in the West Bank this year before the invasion on 28 August (with a reminder that ‘Settler Violence = State Violence’). In a period of just over a fortnight this summer, four Palestinian landowners were arrested after settlers invaded their orchard near Jerusalem (27 July); masked settlers sexually harassed a Palestinian in the South Hebron Hills (4 August) while their cows ate his crops; a soldier harassed Palestinian residents and assaulted an Israeli activist (10 August); twelve families were driven out of Khirbet Um al-Jamal in the Jordan Valley (12 August).

A video posted on 26 August shows Alice Kisiyia, a Palestinian from Beit Jala, standing in front of her land, which Israeli settlers have taken over and fenced off from her. They sit at her family table, behind a fence, as she speaks:

So these are the settlers who came here yesterday. This is our land registration. In the court the judge said it is official … This proves that this is our land … We ask for all free people to come and watch these people sitting here at our table eating on our land. I am requesting every human and advocate to come and help us and stand with us. Thank you.

One of Gaza’s most popular vloggers, Mohammed (Medo) Halimy, planted a peppermint cutting in a tin can. ‘They create death, so we will create life,’ he said, asking his viewers for gardening tips. He was killed in an airstrike on 30 August while on the beach with friends. A girl who makes upbeat cooking videos with what little food is available smiles as she says that she doesn’t want to complain, but it is impossible to keep yourself clean in Gaza, there is no shampoo, no soap or anything and she has these sores on her neck that burn. A man standing next to a crater five storeys deep says it is as though an earthquake has hit Khan Younis. An earthquake would be a blessing in comparison.

Meanwhile in Britain, a group called UK Lawyers for Israel asked the General Medical Council to suspend Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta’s licence to practise. All charges against Ghassan were rejected by the GMC tribunal. The English translations of his tweets in Arabic were found to be inaccurate and Facebook accounts presented as belonging to him were found to belong to other parties. Since he went to work at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza in October, his family have been harassed in London by the police and he was detained on arriving in Germany, where he had been invited to speak at a conference. The travel ban imposed by the German authorities – which has since been overturned by the courts – also meant that Ghassan was denied entry to France, where he had been invited to speak to the Senate.

Ghassan has given evidence to the International Criminal Court on the situation in Gaza and his experience as a doctor working there. When he returned to the UK last November he gave a press conference. ‘On one night I performed amputations on six children,’ he said. ‘Members of the medical staff and nursing staff at Shifa hospital would be running frantically in the emergency department, looking at the faces of the wounded and the dead, to see whether their children had been among the dead and the wounded.’ He described ambulances on fire and patients with high-velocity sniper injuries, including mothers and children. As supplies dwindled he had to operate without anaesthetic, in one case on a nine-year-old girl.

By May, according to the UN, 24 hospitals in Gaza were out of service and 493 health workers had been killed. ‘Each medical centre or humanitarian delivery system has been or is being destroyed,’ Médecins sans Frontières reported, ‘to be replaced by less effective, improvised options.’ Now people are saying on X that all 36 hospitals have been destroyed. It is hard to verify reports as Israel won’t allow foreign journalists into Gaza. ‘The level of suffering we are witnessing in Gaza is unprecedented in my mandate as secretary general of the United Nations,’ Antonio Guterres said yesterday. ‘I’ve never seen such a level of death and destruction as we are seeing in Gaza in the last few months.’ And what he is seeing is a small fraction of the reality on the ground, communicated by exhausted, starving Palestinian journalists and humanitarian aid workers.

The ten-day assault by Israeli forces on villages and cities in the northern occupied West Bank killed dozens of people, including children. On Friday, 6 September, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, a US citizen, was shot dead by Israeli forces at a protest against the expansion of illegal settlements in Beita, near Nablus. A US State Department spokesman said on Monday that the US government would not carry out an independent investigation but will wait for the results of an Israeli inquiry.

‘The civil defence spent the whole night searching but entire families were buried under the rubble or under the sand after this bombing,’ Bisan Owda reported yesterday from the Mawasi ‘safe zone’ in south Gaza. There were three craters, nine metres deep. ‘They found forty dead bodies … A lot of people are missing.’ A boy tells Owda that his mother woke him up to take him away in the night, that he saw body parts and severed heads. She continues:

You need to know after all of this destruction the Israeli representatives and military spokesman said that they took all the procedures to protect civilians and to minimise the deaths between civilians. If they took all procedures and this is the result, just – I don’t want to imagine how would be the result if they did not take any procedures or try to protect the civilians.