While the Israeli government claims it is backing “clans” in Gaza to counter the resistance movement Hamas, the groups it supports more closely resemble criminal gangs, says a British-based security specialist.

Dr Rob Geist Pinfold, international security lecturer at King’s College London, says: “These are criminal gangs. Many were in prison before October 7 for drug offences, not for being political dissidents.

“They rob Palestinians on the streets. They feed off and contribute to the chaos and disorder,” he told Al Jazeera.

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“Many of these people, like Yasser Abu Shabab, are outcasts from their clans. Israel has basically chosen the least popular people in Gaza to arm and equip.

“It’s not trying to create a viable political alternative to Hamas, it’s identifying people who thrive off chaos and encouraging them to further that chaos.”

Dr Pinfold said Israel appeared to be intentionally sowing chaos in Gaza to make the territory “unlivable”.

“It used to look like this chaos in Gaza was the product of Israel not having a day-after plan,” he said. “But I think it is now evident that this chaos is . . .  part of the day-after plan, which is a grander strategy to make Gaza unlivable in the long term.”

Arming criminal gangs
To accomplish this, Israel is arming the criminal gangs that “thrive off chaos” and funnelling the little aid coming in through the dysfunctional and violence-ridden GHF [Gaza Humanitarian Foundation] system.

From Israel’s perspective, “I actually think this is working very well”, he said, “because its undeclared aims are to create chaos and ensure Gaza becomes unlivable”.

“Unfortunately, so far, that is proving to be a very successful strategy.”

Earlier this week it was announced that the death toll had topped 60,430 people (not including the tens of thousands buried under the rubble, or missing and believed dead). This number of dead included more than 18,000 children.

Also, 148,722 wounded were wounded.

Already there have been 162 deaths from starvation in Gaza, 92 of them children and the predictions are dire.

Also, more than 1300 Palestinians have been killed near the GHF aid depots.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Asia Pacific.

A damning new report reveals how Israel is systematically making Gaza unlivable. The independent news outlet +972 Magazine has spoken to Israeli soldiers who describe how they have been using bulldozers and explosives to intentionally flatten Gaza.

In the southern city of Rafah, 73% of buildings are completely destroyed, with only about 4% of the infrastructure remaining undamaged. “The real aim is to make it impossible for the Palestinians to return to these areas,” says Meron Rapoport, co-author of the +972 Magazine report.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Abdullah Al-Arian is a Palestinian American associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar. He is the author of Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt and the editor of Football in the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game. He is also the editor of the Critical Currents in Islam page on the Jadaliyya e-zine and a policy member of Al-Shabaka. In an interview with Diwan conducted via email in early December, Arian analyzed Israel’s ongoing and all-out military assault on the Gaza Strip.

Rayyan Al-Shawaf: We are now several weeks into the massive Israeli military response to the October 7 attack by Gaza-based Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad on southern Israel. What are the people of Gaza facing?

Abdullah Al-Arian: Having already endured a debilitating blockade since 2007 and multiple Israeli military assaults since 2008, the 2.3 million Palestinian residents of Gaza are now suffering an unimaginable combination of the most destructive bombardment campaign of a civilian population in recent memory and the slow death that comes with imposed thirst, starvation, and the total decimation of the healthcare sector. To date, more than 18,000 Palestinians have been killed by this combination of blockade and bombing, over 7,000 of them children. Nearly 50,000 people have been injured, with uncounted others still missing beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings. There is a growing consensus among scholars, legal experts, and human rights officials that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide.

Early indications, both in terms of the statements issued by members of the Israeli government as well as by the military’s actions on the ground, appeared to signal that Israel was pursuing a major ethnic cleansing campaign on the order of the Nakba of 1948, which resulted in the mass expulsion of an estimated 750,000 people—roughly 80–90 percent of Palestinians in the territory that would become Israel. Having failed to convince its American and European allies or any Arab state to accept the mass expulsion of Palestinians into Egypt as a matter of official policy, Israel now appears to be creating conditions whereby Gaza’s territory is significantly diminished through unprecedented destruction and a long-term military occupation.

The post Making Gaza Unlivable appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Abdullah Al-Arian.