Children amid the rubble in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, after an Israeli bombardment, Feb. 3, 2024. (Credit: Mohammad Abed/AFP)
At the end of last week, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Rafah will be the Israeli army's next military target.
Following this statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the army had destroyed “17 of the 24 battalions” of Hamas. “Most of those remaining are in the southern Gaza Strip and Rafah, and we will take care of them,” he added.
This town, bordering Egypt, is home to more than 1.3 million people who fled the war that has ravaged the enclave, according to the UN. France recently expressed its rejection of any “forced displacement” into Egypt of the Gazan population stranded in Rafah.
Guillaume Ancel, former French officer and author of Saint-Cyr, à l'école de la grande muette, explained to L’Orient-Le Jour the implications of this statement, at a time when the bombing of Rafah had already begun.
Tel Aviv has set Rafah as its next military target. What can we expect?
Rafah is where most people are concentrated in Gaza today. If the Israelis attack it, they will therefore complete their destruction of the Gaza Strip. There won’t be a single large inhabitable urban infrastructure left in the strip. It will be carnage forcing an exodus.
This is the objective of Israel, which is working conscientiously to destroy the Gaza Strip. First they told us that Gaza City was the main Hamas base, then they claimed it was Khan Younis, and now Rafah. The aim is clear: To make the Gaza Strip utterly unlivable and uninhabitable, so that the Palestinians leave on their own.
Netanyahu knows well that destroying Hamas is an unattainable goal. So, he is reducing Gaza to a field of rubble. He will do what he did in the West Bank, i.e. he will end up considering the land suitable for settlement once it has been nearly emptied of its population. In the end, there will be perhaps 200,000 Palestinians left in Gaza, whom the settlers will easily be able to drive out of the territory.
Benjamin Netanyahu said that he had ‘destroyed 17 of the 24 battalions’ of Hamas and that the rest are partly in Rafah.
This story about battalions is a figment of his imagination! He’s trying to pretend that he is facing an organized army. But Hamas is anything but that. It’s a militia, and it operates much more like a mafia than a military force in the strict sense of the word. How [does one] destroy a Hamas “battalion” when there is no such thing? Netanyahu is lying, and to everyone. At the same time, he is letting the Israeli hostages die. The same goes to his talk about Hamas’s “command centers.” There aren’t any, strictly speaking.
France refuses any forced displacement of Gazans into Egypt, which is itself opposed to taking in Palestinian refugees. How can we break this deadlock, knowing that Israel has Rafah in its sights?
They can claim that they refuse the exodus as long as they want, but if the territory is razed to the ground, turned into a field of ruins, the exodus would become only natural. Because what else would be left for the Palestinians? They will leave, by any means necessary! This is totally out of touch with reality. You can’t live in a devastated territory with no hospitals or infrastructure. If you want a good future, even just a future for yourself and your children, you won’t stay, whether others like it or not.
This article was originally published in L'Orient-Le Jour. Translated by Joelle El Khoury. Edited by Yara Malka.