Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American historian and one of the foremost scholars on genocide in the world. He has spent over 25 years teaching a class on the subject. He deals with atrocities for a living, analyzing some of the very worst things that human beings are capable of. And yet even Bartov has said he can’t bear looking at some of the excruciating images coming out of Gaza any more.
What’s happening, Bartov says, is unprecedented in the 21st century. “I don’t know of any comparable situation. Recent estimates show that about 70% of the structures in Gaza are either completely destroyed or severely damaged,” Bartov says. “The argument that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is conducting a war in Gaza is simply cynical, there is no war in Gaza. What the IDF is doing in Gaza is demolishing it. Hundreds of buildings are being bulldozed every week. This is not a secret, but mainstream media coverage has been insufficient.”
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All this bulldozing comes with a very clear end goal. “Israeli government officials and media have made [their plans] fairly public,” says Bartov, who, like many other respected scholars, characterises what is happening in Gaza as a genocide. “What they appear to be aiming for – and are in the process of implementing – is for the IDF to take over roughly 75% of the Gaza Strip and demolish it entirely, with bombs and bulldozers, many of which are massive D9s recently imported from the US. The goal seems to be to concentrate the entire Gazan population into the remaining 25% of the territory, in the al-Mawasi area, and to debilitate them to the extent that they either flee, are permitted to leave or simply wither away.”
I had this conversation with Bartov a few weeks ago. Now lawmakers are being even more brazen about their plans: defence minister Israel Katz has said they plan to concentrate people in Gaza into an internment camp on the rubble of Rafah.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/09/bulldzoer-gaza-genocide-idf-meta
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