Rashid Khalidi in The New York Times:
Israel has ordered more than a million people to leave northern Gaza, presumably to prepare for an imminent ground offensive. Its military strategists appear to be planning the depopulation and reoccupation of at least part of an area home to around 2.3 million people — nearly half of them children — and most of them descended from people driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. We must understand that these are human beings at grave risk, not just numbers.
Consider what some in the Israeli defense establishment have said. “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in,” a reservist major general, Giora Eiland, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli newspaper. “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” He added, “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”
More here.