The French historian and political expert Jean-Pierre Filiu said that the nature of the retaliatory response launched by Israel after the attack by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) on October 7, 2023, changed with the reoccupation of Gaza three weeks after that attack, and then changed again on May 6, with the continuation of the attack in Rafah, noting that what distinguished this response in all stages was the horrific massacres.
The professor of political science explained – in his column in the French newspaper Le Monde – that the horrific losses resulting from the Gaza war are increasing day by day, having now exceeded 40,000 martyrs and about 100,000 wounded, which on the French scale represents about 1.3 million dead, a third of whom are children, and 3 million wounded (in terms of the percentage of the number of victims to the total population compared to Gaza). Although the numbers are staggering, international public opinion seems to have become accustomed to this terrifying routine.
This widespread negativity in the world can be explained, he says, by various factors, the most important of which is the ban imposed on the Western press from accessing Gaza, which mitigates the shock of the ongoing tragedy, encourages campaigns of denial, but perhaps also mitigates the loss of meaning, as if this horrific massacre has become incomprehensible.
First wave of revenge
After the October 7 attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government launched an unprecedented wave of attacks on the isolated Gaza Strip, killing nearly 8,000 people in three weeks and forcing two-thirds of the population to flee to areas the Israeli military described as “safe.”
War of Reconquest
The ground campaign launched by Israel in the Gaza Strip differs fundamentally from previous ground interventions that characterized the 2009 and 2014 wars in Gaza, because it is in fact a systematic and destructive reoccupation operation, based on Israel’s complete control over a central axis extending for about 7 kilometers to the Mediterranean Sea, and dividing the Strip in two.
At the same time, as the writer says, the reoccupation process is trying to empty the entire northern Gaza Strip of its inhabitants, even though 300,000 of them refuse to leave, which has led to the number of martyrs rising to nearly 35,000, i.e. an addition of 27,000 martyrs during this phase of the reoccupation of the territories.
Rafah invasion
The ongoing conflict changed its nature again with the attack on Rafah, so much so that Israeli Holocaust historian Omer Bartov believes that “it is now impossible to deny that Israel is systematically involved in war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide.”
But the horrific death toll, which used to reach a thousand per week, has been cut in half, but the difficulty of delivering humanitarian aid, due to the closure of the Rafah border crossing, raises fears of the worst for the population exhausted by hunger, deprivation, lack of hygiene and the spread of disease.
The UN believes that the suffering of civilians in Gaza exceeds “what any human being can bear”, while Netanyahu is now demanding continued control of the “Philadelphi Corridor”, i.e. 12 kilometers from the border with Egypt, which Cairo has consistently rejected, and hence the expected failure of the ceasefire negotiations.