"Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map." Gaza is not an aberration - Israel planned this genocide decades ago. In October 2023, Israel found an excuse to breathe new life into an old story of slaughter and expulsion. The chief differences this time have been of scale and duration

A Palestinian girl wounded in an Israeli strike on a tent encampment for displaced families, according to medics, is carried at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip on 25 May, 2026 (Reuters)

Jonathan Cook

11 June 2026

The truth slowly comes to light: Israel's genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.

Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza. 

Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”

Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”

Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”

Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges... Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”

No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline "We were ordered to kill”. 

Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war - often referred to as the Six-Day War - not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders. 

The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.

None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza - levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population - is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct. 

Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” - the plight of Gaza’s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4. 

Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one of scale and duration. 

Washington and other western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map.

Policy of starvation

The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to “fight the enemy” - or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under cover of war. 

Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied.

This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state. 

Many ended up in refugee camps in neighbouring states such as Lebanon and Syria. But some fled into the surviving pockets of historic Palestine in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza - the 22 per cent of their homeland that had been shielded from further Israeli advances in 1948 by Jordan and Egypt. 

The 1967 war was... READ MORE  https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-not-an-aberration-israels-genocide-gaza-was-planned-decades-ago

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"I visited almost 200 locations. It was never intended to be a project — it was a journey to educate myself and to witness the Palestinian loss of 1948." A Palestinian photographer’s ‘search for what remained’ from 1948 When Nablus-based journalist Ahmad Al-Bazz received an Israeli travel permit, he rushed to visit nearly 200 villages depopulated in the Nakba. Five years later, his new book offers a powerful visual archive of erasure.

Ahmad Al-Bazz | The Erasure of Palestine

How did the experience of documenting these depopulated villages shape the way you perceived and moved through the 1948 territories?

Once you cross the wall, everything feels very foreign. I knew that I was still in Palestine — I’m just crossing a wall that divides it — but what I saw on the ground felt very different from what I was used to. It looked Western, but not like any specific place. You might be standing in front of a very Western-looking city, yet know that it was built over a Palestinian one — like Tel Aviv, which was built on part of Al-Manshiyya and a few other villages. As a photographer, that pushed me to search for what remained and to photograph it. In that sense, the act felt like a form of visual decolonization.

It was also a weird feeling because you are suddenly among the settler community. They don’t know that you’re Palestinian, and you never feel completely okay about it. Yet architecture photography helped me connect with these sites. That was also the visual style of the book: you see the Palestinian layer and the Israeli layer in the background, and I wanted to show the contrast between the two.

As you said, many of your photographs show how closely these depopulated Palestinian villages lie beside new Israeli construction, fenced off with vegetation growing over and obscuring them. What did the condition of these villages tell you about Israeli society?

Palestinian sites take different forms today. Some are destroyed, completely erased, or reduced to rubble, sometimes in nature in the middle of nowhere. In other places, surviving structures are scattered between Israeli houses, as in Haifa, or in Ijzim [now the Israeli moshav Kerem Maharal) and Ein Hod, where wealthy Palestinian houses are inhabited by Israelis. Some sites are abandoned, while others are reused in strange ways: a Palestinian school may become an Israeli school, as in Al-Tira, or a mosque may be turned into an animal shelter, as in Kawfakha. 

https://www.972mag.com/palestinian-destroyed-villages-nakba-photography/ 

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UN experts warn about escalating Israeli settler terror and existential risk posed to Palestinian communities. “Attacks serve as instrument of coercion in the hands of the occupying power, facilitating ethnic cleansing.”

UN Special Procedures

@UN_SPExperts

 

#Palestine: UN experts warn about escalating #Israeli settler terror and existential risk posed to Palestinian communities. “Attacks serve as instrument of coercion in the hands of the occupying power, facilitating ethnic cleansing.” https://ohchr.org/en/press-relea

https://x.com/UN_SPExperts/status/2061433883657146441 

GENEVA – UN experts* today issued a stark warning about surging Israeli settler terror in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the existential risk it poses to Palestinian communities’ presence on the land.

“Relentless attacks by the settler-colonial movement, carried out with the support and acquiescence of the Israeli State, have become a daily terror in Palestinian lives, sowing fear, uncertainty, and profound insecurity that inevitably compels the forcible displacement of the indigenous population,” the experts said. “The escalating violence, carried out with full impunity, serves as an instrument of coercion in the hands of the occupying power, facilitating ethnic cleansing.”

The experts noted a sharp increase in the number of Palestinians killed or injured in settler attacks in 2026. “Settler brutality has reached unprecedented levels this year, with at least thirteen Palestinians killed and close to five hundred injured in five months. Both fatalities and injuries are outpacing figures from previous years,” they said.

Whilst no part of the West Bank has been spared, the continued displacement of Palestinians would expose approximately 663 km² of land to further settlement expansion. Palestinian communities in Area C – which remains under full Israeli military and civil control – are disproportionately affected. This is particularly acute in the Jordan Valley and South Hebron Hills, where communities bear a heavy burden of violence and displacement. In communities such as Masafer Yatta, near-daily raids by Israeli settlers and occupying forces have become a pervasive feature of daily life.

“Violence is used as a calculated, targeted tool to deny Palestinians access to essential services, agricultural and grazing areas, with the ultimate aim of severing the people's connection to the land,” the experts said.

A stark example of this is the village of Umm al-Kheir in the South Hebron Hills. It is now encircled by the Carmel settlement and a new outpost, for which construction began in July 2025. The community has faced repeated water and electricity cuts, demolitions, and violent attacks by settlers. In July, a human rights defender from the community was shot and killed, allegedly by an armed, sanctioned settler, during protests against that construction.... READ MORE  https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/06/occupied-palestinian-territory-un-experts-alarmed-escalating-settler-terror

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B'Tselem: "Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem through discriminatory legislation, planning procedures, funding allocations and service provision, all designed to advance the Judaization of the area. "

B'Tselem בצלם بتسيلم

@btselem

 

Immediately after occupying East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel annexed about 70,000 dunam (1 dunam = 0.1 hectares) from the West Bank to its territory in violation of international law. Parts of this area were added to Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries. 

 

One third of the annexed territory was used to build settlements expressly designed to secure a Jewish majority and create a contiguous territorial bloc, while pushing Palestinian communities out of the urban space. 

 

The Silwan area, located near the Old City, is home to about 20,000 Palestinians who suffer from systemic, criminal neglect in terms of public infrastructure and services the Jerusalem Municipality is obligated to provide: Many streets are unpaved, waste is left to pile up in the streets, and street lighting is limited. 

 

On top of this neglect, residents face daily harassment and violence by both Israeli security forces and settlers. 

 

Right now, about 1,800 Silwan residents are being forced out of their homes, which Israel is granting to settler families. This follows the past two years in which hundreds have already been uprooted and left homeless, as their houses are being demolished to make way for a national park and a parking lot. 

 

Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem through discriminatory legislation, planning procedures, funding allocations and service provision, all designed to advance the Judaization of the area. Read the full article >> https://btselem.org/jerusalem/2026

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6 Things to Know About the Palestinian Nakba by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) - May 12, 2026

Palestine refugees sit inside their tent in the newly formed Ein El Hilweh refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon, in this handout picture believed to be taken in 1948. (Cropped) Myrtle Winter Chaumeny (this link opens in a new window), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons {{PD-US}}

 https://imeu.org/resources/the-nakba/6-things-to-know-about-the-palestinian-nakba/469

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1. During the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Zionist militias and the new Israeli army ethnically cleansed approximately three quarters of all Palestinians from their homeland. Palestinians call this the Nakba (“catastrophe”).

• About 750,000 indigenous Palestinians were violently forced from their homes and land during the founding of Israel. This mass expulsion of Palestinians was a deliberate, planned act of ethnic cleansing as part of Israel’s establishment as a Jewish-majority state in Palestine.
• Ever since, Israel has prevented Palestinian refugees from returning home because they aren’t Jewish, denying their internationally recognized legal right of return. Today, about two-thirds of all Palestinians, more than 7 million people, are stateless refugees or internally displaced. Most languish in overcrowded, impoverished semi-permanent refugee camps in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, subject to brutal Israeli military rule, or in neighboring countries and elsewhere in the diaspora.

2. Zionist militants and Israeli soldiers committed dozens of massacres of Palestinian civilians during the Nakba.

• Zionist militias and Israeli soldiers carried out several dozen massacres (this link opens in a new window) of Palestinians to terrorize them into fleeing. The most infamous took place in the village of Deir Yassin outside of Jerusalem on April 9, 1948, when more than 100 people, including dozens of children, women, and elderly people, were murdered by members of the Irgun and Stern Gang, which were led by future Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, respectively.
• The massacres that were perpetrated during the Nakba were a continuation of a more than decade-long campaign of terrorism waged by the Irun, Stern Gang, and other Zionist militias in their drive to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

3. Israel was literally built upon the destruction of Palestine.

• After the new Israeli army finished expanding the state’s borders, Israel covered 78% of Palestine. (The Israeli military occupied the remaining 22%, consisting of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, in the June 1967 war.)
• Between 1948 and 1950, Israel systematically destroyed more than 400 (this link opens in a new window) Palestinian cities and towns or repopulated them with Jewish Israelis. Entire communities, including homes, businesses, and houses of worship, were wiped out to prevent the return of their Palestinian owners.
• In many cases, the Israelis who took their land and homes also took the personal possessions of Palestinians who were forced to flee on short notice, including clothing, books, children’s toys, furniture, and household items like dishes, pots and pans.

4. Palestinians who survived the Nakba and remained inside what became Israel in 1948 were governed by brutal military rule for nearly two decades and today live as fourth-class citizens in their own homeland.

• About 150,000 Palestinians survived the Nakba and remained inside the new state of Israel. They were granted Israeli citizenship but between 1949 and 1966 they were governed by repressive military rule (this link opens in a new window), forced into segregated “ghettos (this link opens in a new window),” had most of their land taken from them for the use of Jewish Israelis, and severe restrictions were imposed on their freedom of movement, speech, and ability to earn a living.
• Military rule was lifted in 1966 but today Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up more than 20% of Israel’s population, continue to have their land and homes taken or destroyed by the state and face widespread, systematic discrimination affecting almost every aspect of their lives, including land ownership rights, housing, employment, and family reunification.

5. The Nakba didn’t end in 1948 but has continued ever since. This is known as the Ongoing Nakba.

• Since 1948, Israel has continued to force Palestinian families out of their homes, including in places like Sheikh Jarrah (this link opens in a new window) in East Jerusalem and the Negev (Naqab) (this link opens in a new window) desert in southern Israel. It continues to steal Palestinian homes and land for illegal settlements. Israeli settlers are waging an intensifying (this link opens in a new window) campaign of terrorism backed by the government (this link opens in a new window), driving Palestinians out of their communities in the West Bank. Since 2023, the Israeli military has forcibly displaced nearly the entire population and systematically destroyed almost every home during its genocidal campaign in Gaza.

6. The Nakba and Ongoing Nakba, and the apartheid system Israel has imposed on Palestinians living under its control, are the root cause of all the violence in Palestine/Israel.

• For more than a century, Zionist groups and successive Israeli governments have been dispossessing and oppressing the Palestinian people, denying millions of Palestinians their freedom and the most basic of rights. This is the root cause of the problem between Israelis and Palestinians.
• There is a consensus among human rights organizations and other experts, including Amnesty International (this link opens in a new window), Human Rights Watch (this link opens in a new window), and Israeli rights groups like B’Tselem (this link opens in a new window) and Yesh Din (this link opens in a new window), that the discriminatory legal and political system that Israel has imposed on Palestinians amounts to apartheid.
• As noted (this link opens in a new window) by Amnesty International: “Israel must dismantle the apartheid system and start treating Palestinians as human beings with equal rights and dignity. Until it does, peace and security will remain a distant prospect for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Go deeper

• Quick Facts: The Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe)
• Timeline: The Palestinian Nakba & Establishment of Israeli Apartheid
• Explainer: Plan Dalet & The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
• Explainer: The Deir Yassin Massacre
• In Their Own Words: Israeli Leaders on the Expulsion of Palestinians During Israel’s Establishment
• Quick Facts: Palestinian Refugees
• Fact Sheet: Is Israel an Apartheid State?

 

ABOUT The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU)  

 

The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) works to increase and enhance the public’s understanding about Palestine, Palestinians, and Palestinian Americans through media. We do this by offering mainstream US media organizations and journalists access to facts, resources, analysis, and experts in order to help them cover key issues with accuracy and depth, and by creating and disseminating original articles, fact sheets, videos, photo essays, and other digital content. 

Britain and the Nakba: A history of betrayal- An unbroken thread of duplicity, mendacity and chicanery connects British foreign policy from Balfour to the Nakba to the present day

A demonstrator holding an umbrella with colours of the Palestinian flag stands by an Israeli flag during a protest against a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 24 March 2023 (Reuters)

Avi Shlaim

10 May 2023

Britain created the conditions that made the Palestinian Nakba possible.

In 1948, the Palestinians experienced a collective catastrophe of monumental proportions: some 530 villages were destroyed; more than 62,000 homes were demolished; about 13,000 Palestinians were killed; and 750,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of the Arab population of the country were driven out of their homes and became refugees.

This was the climax of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

In its essence, Zionism had always been a settler-colonial movement. Its ultimate aim was to build an independent Jewish state in Palestine on as much of the land as possible and with as few Arabs within its borders as possible. Zionist spokesmen constantly reiterated that they meant no harm to the Arab inhabitants of the country, that they wanted to develop the country for the benefit of both communities.

But this was largely rhetoric, kalam fadi in Arabic, empty talk.... READ MORE  https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/nakba-britain-history-betrayal 

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"The moral and political degradation of Israel is the subject of this remarkable book. The author, Omer Bartov, has impeccable credentials for writing it: he was born on a kibbutz, he served as an officer in the IDF, and is currently professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in the US." Avi Shlaim in The Guardian

Displaced Palestinians move with their belongings following Israeli evacuation orders for Gaza City in September 2025. Photograph: Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images

Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov review – the long view

An erudite account of the foundation of the state and its subsequent moral and political decline

Avi Shlaim

Sat 9 May 2026

Israel’s attack on Iran is only the most recent example of its degeneration in recent decades, coming on top of its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, genocide in Gaza, invasion of Syria and relentless bombardment of Lebanon. The fact that the US joined in this illegal war confirmed to many in the region what they have long suspected: that the country is an outpost of western imperialism in the Middle East.

The state of Israel, which arose from the ashes of the Holocaust 77 years ago, has received an unprecedented degree of international sympathy and support ever since. This support was partly due to western guilt and partly due to the perception of the Jewish state as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. The country’s Declaration of Independence promised to uphold “the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex”. In the early years of statehood, Israel was seen in the west as an icon of liberal, progressive and egalitarian society.

Today, it is widely regarded as an immoral, violent, cruel and oppressive apartheid state... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may/09/israel-what-went-wrong-by-omer-bartov-review-the-long-view

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Jonathan Pollard, a former US navy intelligence analyst jailed for 30 years for spying for Israel, has said he will stand for election to the Knesset this year on a platform of ethnic cleansing.

Jonathan Pollard, a former US navy intelligence officer convicted of spying for Israel, pictured in New York City in 2017. Photograph: Brendan McDermid/Reuters

 

Ex-US spy for Israel calls for Gaza ethnic cleansing as he seeks Knesset seat

Jonathan Pollard, who served 30 years for selling US military secrets, advocates ‘forcible removal’ of Palestinians

Julian Borger in Jerusalem

Tue 5 May 2026 14.21 EDT

Jonathan Pollard, a former US navy intelligence analyst jailed for 30 years for spying for Israel, has said he will stand for election to the Knesset this year on a platform of ethnic cleansing.

Speaking to Channel 13 television, Pollard said: “I personally prefer the forcible removal of all current residents of Gaza, and the annexation of Gaza and its repopulation by us.”

Pollard said he decided to enter politics because of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israeli communities that killed nearly 1,200 people and triggered the Gaza war. He blamed the Israeli government for failure to prevent the attack or intervene quickly after it began.

“Until then, I thought that the abandonment and betrayal I experienced from the government was an exception and not the rule, but after October 7 I realized that I was not an exception,” he said.

Pollard was released on parole at the age of 61 from US prison in 2015 after serving 30 years for selling military secrets to Israel for money. He and his wife, Anne Henderson, were arrested in 1985 after Pollard passed a huge volume of classified documents to Israeli intelligence – enough to fill a 10ftx6ftx6ft room, by Pollard’s own calculation. In return he received cash and jewels... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/05/jonathan-pollard-israel-gaza-ethnic-cleansing

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