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The endgame for Gaza begins
A look back and forward
Jonathan M. Katz
May 05, 2025
Today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed what anyone paying attention could have told you in late 2023: Israel’s final plan for Gaza is to occupy and ethnically cleanse the strip. This is horrific news, most of all for the shrinking population of roughly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. At least 52,000 people have been registered as killed (over half of those children, women, and the elderly, the true total is likely far more). Nearly all the survivors are facing shortages of water, medicine, and food, often at critical levels. Not only will many more now die but those who make it through this next phase, Haaretz reports, will be “transferred” either to the “south of the enclave” (i.e., occupied Rafah and/or the buffer with Egyptian Sinai) or, if Israel gets its way, to other countries entirely.
It is also terrible news for the remaining Israeli hostages in whose name this murderous counterinsurgency was launched roughly 570 days ago. As Haaretz reports, the Israeli Hostages and Missing Families Forum said “that the plan should be named the ‘Smotrich-Netanyahu plan’”—a reference to Netanyahu and fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—to “give up on the hostages and Israel’s security and national resilience.”
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The latest reporting, sourced to a “senior security official,” is that this final invasion will not come until after Donald Trump visits Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates later this month. It could supposedly be scrapped if Israel and Hamas strike a new hostage deal. But of course there was already a hostage and ceasefire deal in place and agreed upon by the two sides, which Israel unilaterally broke in March, sixteen days before the phase including a full hostage exchange was supposed to begin.
Getting here has required so many crimes and acquiescence to those crimes that it would be impossible to enumerate them all. Fortunately or otherwise, I have been writing about this since long before Oct. 7, 2023. So instead of attempting to rehash them all again, I’m going to put together a brief tour d’horizon through a few relevant issues of The Racket. Some you may have read before. Some may read differently to in light of ensuing events:
There had long been a love affair between the American and Israeli right (Jan. 5, 2023)
Rooted in (trigger word warning) settler colonialism (Aug. 3, 2023)
Which is why Netanyahu’s murderous post-Oct. 7 strategy was his pre-Oct. 7 strategy, rooted in a century of militant Zionist ideology (Oct. 11, 2023)
A quote:
I’ll end with two figures to keep in mind: half of Gaza’s population is under 18, and nearly 40 percent is under 15. What happens now will shape the next decades of life in Gaza, Israel, and beyond; how many grow up in both places believing, as Netanyahu does, that the only path to survival and freedom is through violence, casting new iron walls of their own.
Officials in Biden’s State Department tried (fruitlessly) to warn him about what is coming (Oct. 19, 2023)
Some of us tried belatedly to self-reflect (Oct. 24, 2023)
When I learned about the Oct. 7 attack, I reacted with instinctive double horror. I was horrified by the event itself, that so many Israeli civilians—my people, after all—had been so horrifically murdered and violated in so many ways. But I was also in that instant seized with the revelation of what was about to come. If Israel reacted so murderously in the past to a tunnel, or to people trying to cross a fence, what less than calculated mass murder could follow?
Biden officials kept trying to warn everyone what was happening (while covering their asses) (Nov. 3, 2023)
“If this really goes bad, we want to be able to point to our past statements,” a senior U.S. official said. The official said the administration is particularly worried about a narrative taking hold that Biden supports all Israeli military actions and that U.S.-provided weapons have been used to kill Palestinian civilians, many of them women and children. The Defense Department has said the U.S. is not putting any limits or restrictions on the weapons it’s providing Israel.
There were warnings from military history too (Nov. 15, 2023)
The best chance at rescuing the hostages was, then as now, negotiation (Nov. 24, 2023)
But hostages are more useful to the Netanyahu government as hostages than free (June 4, 2024)
Biden signaled to me that Israel could theoretically go too far, even for him (April 30, 2024)
And sometimes it seemed like they did (May 10, 2024)
After all, standing U.S. law demands we cut off arms being used in a genocide (April 2, 2024)
But Israel is just too important to the empire (June 14, 2024)
And American public opinion is crucial for Israel too. See: Netanyahu’s gaslighting speech to Congress last summer (July 24, 2024)
Which set the stage both for a new Democratic nominee and her refusal to change course (Aug. 23, 2024)
… clearing the deck for the return of a warmonger (Oct. 31, 2024)
… who further criminalized dissent (March 10, 2025)
Leading us to now.
A Palestinian boy squats at the site of an Israeli strike on a residential area in Gaza City's Shujaiyya neighborhood, on April 9, 2025 (Photo by OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP via Getty Images)
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