Coming soon a video of Isreal before the war started announcing that Palestinians would return to scorched lands just one month in, and Isreal has dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs in just two months
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Israel-Palestine conflict
Israel is taking scorched earth policy to a new level
Gaza is not the first place where Israel is inflicting or helping inflict mass devastation. But it is the first to see it on this shocking scale.
Published On 16 Dec 202316 Dec 2023
Palestinians gather at the site of Israeli strikes on houses in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip on December 14, 2023 [Reuters/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa]
In October, shortly after the start of the Israeli war on Gaza that has now killed nearly 20,000 Palestinians, Israel pledged to wipe Hamas “off the face of the earth” – a project that would require Israel’s military “to flatten the ground” in Gaza, as an Israeli security source told the Reuters news agency.
And flatten they did; one month into the war, the military had already dropped
the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on the diminutive and densely populated Palestinian coastal enclave. Now, as Israel continues to pulverise an already thoroughly pulverised territory, it seems the Israelis may be taking the concept of scorched earth policy to a whole new level.
According to the Oxford Reference dictionary, the term “scorched earth policy” was first utilised in English in 1937 in a report describing the Sino-Japanese conflict, in which the Chinese levelled their own cities and burned crops in order to complicate the Japanese invasion. The strategy has since been seen in an array of armed conflicts worldwide, including the 36-year civil war in Guatemala that ended in 1996 after killing and disappearing more than 200,000 people, primarily Indigenous Mayans.