Description

Al Jazeera UpFront
Oct 13, 2023

Hamas' Senior Spokesman, Osama Hamdan:
UpFront's Marc Lamont Hill:
: "How do you justify killing innocent civilians."

Hamdan: "You are asking the wrong question."

. . .
_______

Ex-Israeli Deputy Foreign minister & senior diplomat, Danny Ayalon His portion of the interview begins at minute 11:52

«We don’t tell Gazans to go to the beaches or drown themselves… No God forbid.. Go to the Sinai Dessert.. the Int’l community will build them cities & give them food.. Egypt ought to play ball with it”

. . .
____

Khaled Fahmy
@khaledfahmy11
Oct 13, 2023

The Israeli Ex-Deputy foreign minister gave this incredibly revealing interview explaining Israel's order to 1.1 million inhabitants to move from northern Gaza to the southern half of the tiny strip.

Forget the part where he talks about the humanitarian corridor (which had been targeted leading to the death of defenseless civilians who thought they were escaping to safety).

What is amazing in revealing the logic of ethnic cleansing is when says: "This is thought out... There is a huge expanse, almost endless space in the Sinai desert, just on the other side of Gaza. ... The idea is for them to leave over for the open areas where we, and the international community, will prepare the infrastructure, ten cities, with food and water... just like for the refugees of Syria that fled the butchering of Asad.... There is a way to receive them all on the other side for temporary time on [sic.] Sinai... and Egypt will have to play ball."

What is amazing here is not only explicitly equating what Israel is doing with the "butchering of Asad", but how revealing his language is of the Israeli blueprint of ethnic cleansing: instigate atrocities that would frighten the civilian population; "advise" them to leave their homes in order to avoid being caught in the crossfire; provide "safe" corridors that turn out anything but; promise them that this is only a temporary measure and that they would be allowed to return back to their homes once the hostilities cease; and tell the neighboring countries to "play ball" and effectively tell these countries that this is their responsibility. And once the helpless, frightened civilians move with their meagre belongings, and after they settle in their "temporary" new camps, they find out that there is nothing temporary about their new situation, that they can't go back home, that Israel has sealed the borders, demolished their homes and confiscated their property.
This is what happened in 1948 and 1967. To the letter. But now we have it explicitly spelt out by a high ranking Israeli official: we will ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip.
____

The Sinai desert: From strategic depth to strategic threat

Previously regarded as a vast demilitarized zone that ensured calm, the peninsula is increasingly seen as a potential source of Egypt-Israel conflict

By MITCH GINSBURG for The Times of Israel
19 June 2012

The vast Sinai desert, 23,000 square kilometers of rough mountainous terrain, was once seen as the great guarantor of peace between Israel and Egypt. Even without good will, even if the Egyptians thirsted to attack Israel, there could be no surprise strike. Tanks would have to labor through the desert for days. Planes would have to make tracks across a large swath of demilitarized sky.

Today, after yet another deadly attack carried out from within Sinai, the opposite is true. The friction along the border threatens to erode the foundations of the Israeli-Egyptian peace.

Speaking on Channel 2 news on Monday, Yaari, the channel’s Arab affairs analyst, called the Sinai Peninsula “a front” and “a sort of Fatahland” – a reference to the part of southern Lebanon that hosted the PLO and pushed Israel to war in the summer of 1982.

In his article, Yaari, who at this point believes that the Sinai Peninsula is “conceptually and economically annexed to the Gaza Strip,” suggested a redeployment of Egyptian troops in the peninsula, allowing several brigades to move farther east into the mountainous areas in central and northeastern Sinai.

In an article for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in January, Arab affairs analyst Ehud Yaari argued that skirmishes along the border could spark a military conflict, citing both southern Lebanon and the Jordan Valley as areas where Israeli clashes with terrorists eventually led to battles between the IDF and the standing militaries in Lebanon and Jordan respectively.

Features