Starvation is being used to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip in line with the Greater Israel project, Gavin O’Reilly writes.

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On the 12th of August, media outlet Axios revealed that the United States and Israel were in discussions to establish a land corridor between the occupied Golan Heights and the southern Syrian city of Suwayda, ostensibly to protect the country’s Druze minority. The following Saturday, protests broke out in Suwayda calling for Druze self-determination, with many in attendance waving Israeli flags.

Last December, following a lightning offensive by insurgents based in the northwestern city of Idlib, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad collapsed in dramatic fashion. This marked the culmination of a thirteen-year effort by various powers to impose regime-change on the Arab Republic. One such power was Israel, who had provided arms to Salafist militants opposed to Assad’s secular rule. Syria, having acted as a conduit between Iran and Hezbollah, had long been in Tel Aviv’s crosshairs.

Within hours of Assad’s fall, Israel launched a ground invasion of southern Syria. Tel Aviv declared that this was in order to establish a buffer zone between Israel and Syria’s new Islamist government, in spite of the fact Damascus’ new rulers had effectively acted in Israel’s interests over the past decade. Israel also later stated that it intended to defend Syria’s Druze minority.

Syria, like Iraq and Libya before it, had subsequently fallen into bloody sectarian strife following Assad’s removal from power. In early March, government pogroms along Syria’s coast resulted in the deaths of more than 1,400 members of the Shi’a Alawite minority. Rather than any concern over sectarian bloodshed however, Israel’s interest in the Druze instead lies primarily in achieving a geostrategic goal that has been planned for decades.

In 1982, Oded Yinon, a senior official at the Israeli foreign ministry, penned a paper entitled A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. More commonly known as the Yinon Plan, the document was published by the World Zionist Organisation in the Hebrew journal KIVUNIM. In it, Yinon prioritised the dissolution of Iraq along ethnic and religious lines as a key long-term strategic goal for Israel.

Iraq, which subscribed to the pan-Arab Ba’athist ideology, had begun to emerge as Israel’s main regional rival following the Camp David Accords and the normalisation of ties between Egypt and Israel. In 1981, the Israeli Air Force had bombed the under-construction Osirak in eastern Iraq, after suspecting it would be used to develop nuclear weapons.

In early 1991, amidst the breakout of the Gulf War, Iraq launched dozens of scud missiles towards Israel. This was done in the hope that an Israeli response would galvanise Arabs across the region and undermine Gulf support for the U.S.-led coalition. Following pressure from the United States however, Israel would ultimately not respond to these strikes. By the end of February 1991, Iraqi forces had been defeated in Kuwait.

Though it subsequently emerged that the U.S. had gone to war on a fabricated account of Iraqi troops removing premature infants from incubators and leaving them to die on a hospital floor, Washington still maintained a belligerent stance towards Iraq. In April 1991, the U.S., Britain and France imposed a no-fly zone over northern Iraq, ostensibly to protect the Kurdish minority. The following year, a similar no-fly zone was put in place over the south of the country, this time under the pretext of protecting Shi’ite Muslims. Like Israel’s current interest in the Druze, this too had a strategic purpose.

The Yinon Plan outlined how in order to Balkanise Iraq, the country would have to be divided into three distinct sections. In the north of the country, a Kurdish separatist state based around the city of Mosul, in central Iraq, a Sunni region tied to the capital Baghdad, and in the south, a Shi’ite region centred around Basra. The United States’ no-fly zones effectively polarised Iraq along these lines.

Following the 9/11 attacks, a radical new U.S. foreign policy was put into place, beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. Eighteen months after September 11th, a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, in spite of the fact no tangible evidence was ever produced to link Saddam Hussein to the attacks. Coalition forces quickly toppled the Iraqi government, and replaced it with a provisional authority. Its first executive order was to permanently ban all members of the Ba’ath Party from working in the public sector. Iraq subsequently plunged into sectarian bloodshed in the wake of the invasion.

Like Iraq, Ba’athist Syria was also identified by the Yinon Plan as a target for Balkanisation. The 1982 document envisaged a Sunni state in northern Syria centred on the city of Aleppo, an Alawite state along Syria’s Mediterranean coast, and another Sunni state, based around the southern capital of Damascus and hostile to its northern counterpart. Amidst this division, Yinon predicted the establishment of a separatist Druze state in the occupied Golan Heights and the Hauran region of southern Syria and northern Jordan.

Following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government, such an arrangement has now effectively been put in place. Northwest Syria, where Aleppo is located, has become a stronghold of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which led the offensive that ended Assad’s rule, is based in the capital Damascus. Its recent pogroms against the coastal Alawites polarising Syria along the same sectarian divisions outlined in the Yinon Plan. The recent Israeli-backed calls for Druze self-determination serve to even further fragment the former Arab Republic in line with the 1982 paper.

On the same day that Axios outlined U.S.-Israeli negotiations to establish a land corridor to Suwayda, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed by journalist and former Knesset member Sharon Gal for the Israeli outlet i24. When presented by Gal with an amulet containing ‘a map of the Promised Land’, Netanyahu stated that he felt a connection to a vision of ‘Greater Israel’. This is a historical Zionist term referring to an expansionist Israeli state that would incorporate the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights at a minimum.

On Wednesday, Israel announced plans to construct 3,400 housing units in the West Bank between Jerusalem and the eastern settlement of Ma’ale Adumin. Such a move would effectively partition the territory between north and south. Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli minister who announced the plan, declared that it would ‘bury the idea of a Palestinian state’.

Last year, Miriam Adelson, wife of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, donated $100mn to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. This was done on condition that the Republican candidate would endorse the formal Israeli annexation of the West Bank if elected. Sheldon Adelson, who died in 2021, had previously donated $20mn to Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016. This too had a stipulation attached. That the U.S. Embassy would be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move that Trump subsequently followed through with in December 2017.

24 hours after Trump’s inauguration in January of this year, Israel launched Operation Iron Wall. Intended to destroy the Jenin refugee camp, Iron Wall has resulted in the largest mass-expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank since 1967.

Since October 7th 2023, Israel has subjected the beleaguered Gaza Strip to a military onslaught in response to Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. This was the largest military incursion into Israel since the 1973 October War. Global media attention was drawn to the fact that the Supernova music festival was taking place on the Gaza border at the same time. However, less attention was paid to the revelation that the event had only been moved to that location two days beforehand. That there were no security or insurance concerns over holding a music festival in direct proximity to a location where clashes had taken place between Islamic Jihad and Israeli forces the previous summer, simply beggars belief.

Further questions arose when it emerged that Egypt, which acts as mediator between Hamas and Israel, had repeatedly warned Tel Aviv that ‘something big’ was coming in the run up to October 7th. This was corroborated by two media reports from The New York Times and CNN, which revealed that U.S. intelligence had also passed on similar warnings to Israel prior to Al-Aqsa Flood. By December 2023, it was revealed that Israel had known of Hamas’ attack plan over a year in advance.

Seven months prior to October 7th, Orit Strock, the Israeli minister responsible for the development of settlements in the West Bank, called Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza a ‘sin’. Strock was speaking upon the repeal of legislation that had ordered the dismantlement of four West Bank settlements. This was declared by Strock as a precursor to the eventual re-occupation of Gaza, a move that would ‘involve many casualties’.

Indeed, this sentiment was later echoed by Israeli security minister Yoav Gallant, who in the days following October 7th announced a blockade on Gaza, cutting off electricity and preventing food and fuel from entering the besieged strip. Gallant described Palestinians as ‘human animals’, language that couldn’t be described as anything less than genocidal.

In April 2024, a report by The Times of Israel revealed that an offer by Hamas to release all civilian captives in exchange for Israeli forces not entering the strip had been rejected by Tel Aviv. Three months later, a Haaretz report revealed that the Hannibal Directive had been applied on October 7th. This is an Israeli military directive in which a command is given to fire upon their own troops in order to prevent them being taken captive. Its use on October 7th was a significant contributory factor to the death toll on the day. Despite these damning revelations, the Israeli slaughter in Gaza has continued unabated for almost two years.

On Friday, the United Nations released a report officially acknowledging the presence of a man-made famine in Gaza. UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk did not shy away from placing blame for the situation, and held Israel responsible for what is in reality, a genocide. Starvation is being used to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip in line with the Greater Israel project. A project that now also has designs on the Druze and southwestern Syria.