The Sisyphus Doctrine

The IDF's renewed assault on the Jabalia refugee camp and its retaliatory massacres in Rafah show Israel has no plan for Gaza other than to kill and destroy, but without achieving military victory.

A Palestinian fighter pulls the pin on a grenade he has stuck between the turret and the tracks of an Israeli Merkava tank as it attacks Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza. Source: al-Qassam Brigades

It is December 2023.

The IDF has announced the dismantling of the military infrastructure of Hamas in the Jabalia refugee camp, and in the north of the Gaza Strip as a whole. The army will withdraw from the area in the coming months, moving to focus on the invasion of the city of Khan Younis in the Strip’s south.

It is May 2024.

The IDF has fought for more than two weeks in the Jabalia refugee camp, and now appears to have largely withdrawn from the area. Despite claims that Hamas’ capabilities had been destroyed last year, the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, can only be seen as having completely reconstituted itself, if the IDF’s original assessment of total victory was ever to be believed to begin with.

In the aftermath of the battle, video emerged of the devastation to the camp of entire streets blown to smithereens, buildings hollowed out and collapsed, with a level of destruction that local journalist Imad Zakout compared to an “atomic bomb” striking the refugee camp.

There would be no assertions of dismantling any battalions, no claims of major inroads made to destroy Hamas’ capabilities once again, only the symbolic destruction of a tunnel that the bodies of Israeli hostages were supposedly found in such as Shani Louk, despite the Israeli president’s earlier claims of having already found parts of Louk’s body in October.

The raid was sold to the Israeli public initially as a mission to stop Hamas from merely making “attempts” to “reassemble”, the desolation wrought on the Jabalia camp can only be seen as one thing: punishing Palestinian society for continuing to exist after the IDF had already carved a path of ruination through it once before.