{"id":327929,"date":"2026-06-13T05:38:22","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T05:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=327929"},"modified":"2026-06-15T07:57:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T07:57:40","slug":"how-israel-planned-the-gaza-genocide-decades-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=327929","title":{"rendered":"How Israel planned the Gaza genocide decades ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Cook \u2013 jonathan-cook.net June 12, 2026<\/strong><\/h1>\n

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<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The truth slowly comes to light: Israel\u2018s genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.<\/p>\n

Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza.<\/p>\n

Soldier 1: \u201cHuman lives didn\u2019t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it\u2019s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soldier 2: \u201cAt first I wasn\u2019t willing to execute Arabs who weren\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soldier 3: \u201cWe caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soldier 4: \u201cWe would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges\u2026 Every soldier who was there created a \u2018concentration camp\u2019, and they didn\u2019t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cWe were ordered to kill<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war \u2013 often referred to as the Six-Day War \u2013 not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders.<\/p>\n

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

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<\/a> \u2013 levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands<\/a>, more likely hundreds of thousands<\/a>, of Palestinian civilians<\/a>; and blocking aid and starving the population \u2013 is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct.<\/p>\n

Nothing \u201cstarted\u201d on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza \u201cconcentration camp\u201d \u2013 the plight of Gaza\u2019s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Starvation policy<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to \u201cfight the enemy\u201d \u2013 or \u201ceradicate the terrorists\u201d, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under cover of war.<\/p>\n

Few soldiers were shy of saying why<\/em> they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 the 22 per cent of their homeland that had been shielded from further Israeli advances in 1948 by Jordan and Egypt.<\/p>\n

The 1967 war was seen by the Israeli leadership as a second bite of the cherry: a chance both to seize and colonise all of historic Palestine through military occupation and the establishment of Jewish militia settlements, and to expand the ethnic cleansing operation to rid historic Palestine of its native inhabitants.<\/p>\n

Weeks after Israel seized the Palestinian territories, the prime minister of the time, Levi Eshkol<\/a>, told his cabinet where the expulsions must begin. \u201cWe are interested in emptying out Gaza first,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Given international pressures, he was clear that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza would need to proceed by stealth, so as to attract less attention. Foreshadowing Israel\u2019s 16-year siege of Gaza<\/a> that started in 2007, he proposed that Palestinians could be forced out of Gaza \u201cprecisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment\u201d Israel was imposing there.<\/p>\n

The ethnic cleansing programme could be hastened, he suggested<\/a>, by depriving the population of essentials like water. \u201cPerhaps if we don\u2019t give them enough water, they won\u2019t have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this spirit, 40 years later, Israel would go on to calculate the minimum number of calories to allow into Gaza so that the people there would grow steadily more malnourished. Or as senior government adviser Dov Weisglass explained in 2006: \u201cThe idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet<\/a>, but not to make them die of hunger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seventeen years after Gaza was forced on to its \u201cdiet\u201d, when Hamas briefly broke out of the enclave, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals seized their moment.<\/p>\n

They destroyed those \u201corchards\u201d and transformed the \u201cdiet\u201d into a full-blown starvation blockade<\/a> \u2013 a crime against humanity for which Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, are wanted<\/a> by the International Criminal Court.<\/p>\n

Targeting innocents<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The crimes of 1967 were understood long ago by Palestinian historians<\/a>, who were, of course, not listened to. Israeli historians took much longer to start piecing together the story as they gained access to parts of Israel\u2019s military archives.<\/p>\n

Haaretz\u2019s new investigation, based on research by the Akevot Institute<\/a>, provides details of the ruthlessness of the mass expulsions of Palestinians beginning in 1967.<\/p>\n

As the paper reports: \u201cThe historical inquiry shows that Israel expelled and drove out some 300,000 Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and the [Syrian] Golan Heights. And as in 1948, the expulsion included killing civilians, sowing terror in Arab communities, looting and ultimately, destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having managed in 1967 to again expel large numbers of Palestinians, the next task \u2013 as in 1948 \u2013 was to prevent their return.<\/p>\n

Uri Avnery, a journalist and member of the Israeli parliament, recorded testimonies from soldiers stationed at the borders with Jordan and Egypt, into which Palestinians had been expelled. The soldiers\u2019 job was to murder any Palestinian families trying to get back to their homes.<\/p>\n

Here is one soldier\u2019s testimony, reported by Haaretz, that Avnery noted in his autobiography:<\/p>\n

We blocked these crossings and received orders to shoot to kill, without prior warning. Indeed, such shots were fired every night at men, women and children, even on moonlit nights when it was possible to identify those crossing. That is, to distinguish between men and women and children.<\/p>\n

In the morning, we would go out to scan the area, and we would kill, by explicit order of the officer present, those who were alive, including those hiding and the wounded. After the killing was over, we would cover the bodies with dirt until a tractor arrived.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s Israeli whistleblowers warn that this military doctrine is unchanged. Over the past three years, investigations have repeatedly shown Israel trying to conceal its crimes by secretly bulldozing its civilian victims into mass graves in violation of international law.<\/p>\n

It did so, for example, when troops massacred Palestinians<\/a> seeking aid a year ago, and again when soldiers executed<\/a> 15 Palestinian emergency workers in an ambush on ambulances in March 2025.<\/p>\n

Another soldier troubled by the 1967 shoot-to-kill policy recalled a conversation with his commander: \u201cI asked the officer: And if I hear babies crying, should I shoot them too? The answer I received was: Don\u2019t be a girl.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is nothing exceptional about this. Israel is known to have killed more than 1,000 babies in Gaza<\/a> under the age of one since 7 October 2023, not all of them anonymously in strikes from the air.<\/p>\n

The Israeli military allowed a group of five premature babies in al-Nasser hospital to die<\/a> and decompose in their incubators after its soldiers took over the building in late 2023.<\/p>\n

Israeli commanders also knew that the first to die from a blockade of aid would be the most vulnerable. Babies froze or starved to death as the population was deprived <\/a>of shelter, baby formula and food, with their mothers lacking sufficient nutrition to produce milk.<\/p>\n

As Soldier 2 noted, Israeli military doctrine encourages soldiers to stop seeing Palestinians, even Palestinian babies, as \u201chuman\u201d. Their lives are considered worthless.<\/p>\n

Israeli soldiers murdered another Palestinian baby<\/a> last week in the West Bank, after they ambushed a car driven by a lecturer from Bethlehem university, Fahd Abu Haikal, in the Palestinian city of Hebron, which is under particularly brutal occupation.<\/p>\n

One of the soldiers fired into the car, as it was slowing to a halt<\/a>, from only a few metres away, from where he must have been able to see the passengers inside. The bullet killed Abu Haikal\u2019s seventh-month-old baby, Sam, and wounded his wife, who was holding the infant. Abu Haikal\u2019s 11-year-old son, also in the car, watched his baby brother bleed to death.<\/p>\n

Israeli soldiers have been murdering Palestinian babies for decades. Yet none of it has roused an ounce of the outrage uniformly expressed by western media and politicians at Israel\u2019s entirely fabricated claim that Hamas killed 40 babies on 7 October 2023.<\/p>\n

In fact, only one Israeli baby was killed that day<\/a>: nine-month-old Mila Cohen, who, like Sam Abu Haikal, was shot in her mother\u2019s arms.<\/p>\n

Squeezed out<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Israel\u2019s 1967 campaign of expulsions in Gaza and the West Bank was not improvised, nor was it done on the spur of the moment. According to Haaretz, the policy had been carefully planned many years in advance.<\/p>\n

Since 1948, Israel had been waiting for a moment to carry out additional expulsions and seize the last parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories it had been denied for the completion of its violent settler colonial project.<\/p>\n

The 1967 war \u2013 against Egypt, Syria and Jordan \u2013 provided the pretext.<\/p>\n

Ishai Amrami, a senior battalion commander in that war, later admitted: \u201cThis thing, which I experienced first hand, was an attempt at massive population transfer.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Haaretz observes: \u201cThe Palestinians were mere bystanders in this story. Defence Minister Moshe Dayan wrote in his memoirs that the Palestinians residing in the West Bank did not take part in the war, and that it was not their war. Nevertheless, they were the ones who paid its price.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israel began the mass destruction of Palestinian communities, as it had done after 1948, so there would be no homes for Palestinians to return to. But as Haaretz notes, Israel became a victim of its own rapid military success.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was one of the rare instances in the history of the conflict where Israel was forced to back down due to heavy international pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n

It hardly needs pointing out that, unlike 1967, such international pressure has been sorely missing over the past three years. The new cast of western leaders, like Britain\u2019s Sir Keir Starmer, once a noted human rights lawyer, have justified<\/a> Israel\u2019s explicitly exterminationist agenda against the Palestinians of Gaza, terming it \u201cself-defence\u201d.<\/p>\n