Israeli rulers, even those considered rather moderate, have been seeking a plan to depopulate Palestinians from their motherland. Probably the October 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel provided the ill-wishers in Israel with an excuse to go ahead with the plan more speedily and more cruelly.

Punishing an entire 2.3 million people in the Gaza Strip for the October 7 attack has no justification. Only mad persons and those who formulate vicious plots in their minds can cause so much tragedy for hundreds of thousands of people.

Words fail to describe the sufferings of the Palestinians in Gaza. It is even difficult to imagine the tragedies that the Gazans have suffered since October 7.

Imagine more than two million people who are being ruthlessly attacked from the air, land and sea; denied water and food; seeing dear ones caught under demolished buildings; not being given the time to grieve the family members killed in incessant bombardments; being denied to sleep; forced to leave their cities or camps and take shelter in schools, mosques, churches, UN headquarters, or hospitals and even dropping bombs on them while taking refuge there.

All these crimes are taking place for more than two million population in just 365 square kilometers. There is no safe place for them to go. They are being targeted while being forced to leave from one place to another.  

Richard Falk, an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University, describes such a situation as “a nightmare beyond even Kafka’s darkest imagining”.

Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, has told Al Jazeera, “We’ve never seen 2.2 million civilians made to go hungry within weeks. We have never seen this degree of hunger used as a weapon so quickly and so completely, ever.”

“It doesn’t happen by chance. Starvation, wherever it happens, is always the result of political choices and this is the same case here,” Fakhri said.

Alex De Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the U.S., also says the speed at which “starvation” has been brought about among Gaza’s population is “unprecedented”.

“I’ve been studying this for 40 years and I’ve never seen a population reduced [to this level of hunger] with the same speed and rigor and ruthlessness,” De Waal told Al Jazeera.

It is amazing why more than two million Gazans are being subjected to such a degree of horrific death, terror, starvation, grief, displacement, etc. under the eyes of the world in the first quarter of the 21st century. 

Extremist religionists, who formulate “greater Israel” in their mind, openly say they seek to force Palestinians to leave Gaza.

However, evil persons like Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant are deceptively claiming that they are only seeking to “eliminate” Hamas militants. If is it really so why so far more than 25,000 people, mostly children, have been killed and more than 63,000 injured?

Persons such as Bezalel Smotrich Itamar and Ben-Gvir are straightforward. Smotrich says 70% of Israelis support “voluntary emigration”’ from the Gaza Strip.

Smotrich has also said Israel must reestablish a Jewish presence in the coastal Gaza enclave because “if we won’t be there and there will be 2 million Nazis (Palestinians) who want to annihilate us every morning when they wake up, we won’t exist, period.”

Nissim Vaturi, Knesset Deputy Speaker and far-right Likud Party member, said in a post on X in November that Gaza must be burned. “All of this preoccupation with whether or not there is internet in Gaza shows that we have learned nothing. We are too humane. Burn Gaza now no less!” Vaturi said, according to the Hebrew TV Channel 12.

The project of depopulating Palestine from the Palestinians is being pushed forward in two ways: genocide in Gaza and annexing the remaining Palestinian lands in the West Bank.

The crimes being committed in Gaza make other crimes in other places in the world in the current century pale in the face of what is going on in the coastal Gaza enclave.

Efforts by Israel to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank have also intensified under Israel’s current rulers.

According to the New York Times, settler supporters oppose the idea of a Palestinian state and view the West Bank as the birthright of the Jewish people or as a necessary buffer for the security of Israel.

Since the October 7 attacks, settlers and Israeli forces have been treating Palestinians cruelly in the West Bank as well.

Under the cover of the war in Gaza, Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank have carried out a “surge” of unauthorized moves to expand their footprint in the territory, according to a report by Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group that opposes settlements.

The Washington Post also ran a headline on January 9 that stated, “Settlers in the West Bank killed a Palestinian teen. Israeli forces didn’t stop it.”

Now the main question is why the Western countries are openly or tacitly backing Israel’s actions in Gaza, providing arms to it and refusing to stop these criminally Israeli insane rulers. As they regretted the failure to prevent the Srebrenica massacre, they may also regret inaction toward tragedies in Gaza and Israeli religionists’ vicious plan to erase the name of Palestine.