If it looks like ethnic cleansing ...

 

While avoiding the reptiles, the pond has been roaming wild and free, and this Haaretz editorial was simply too important to leave lurking behind a paywall. 

It was titled If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is, came out a couple of days ago, and started off with a snap, labelled Palestinians carry their belongings as they flee areas of Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip, earlier in October:

It has to be said that in terms of showing devastation, it didn't quite match up to the visual comparison featuring destruction in Lebanon, which accompanied a NY Times story:

Never mind, there's not much point in measuring, comparing and contrasting ethnic cleansing porn, there's too much of it about. 

Instead here's what Haaretz said:

For three and a half weeks, Israeli forces have been besieging the northern Gaza Strip. Israel has almost completely blocked the entry of humanitarian aid, thereby starving the hundreds of thousands of people who live there. Information emerging from the besieged area is only partial, because ever since the war began, Israel has barred journalists from entering Gaza.
But even based on the little that has been revealed to the public, two things can be said about the siege. First, the scale of the civilian casualties from the army's daily bombings of towns and refugee camps in northern Gaza – children, women, elderly people and men who are innocent of any crime – is enormous.
Moreover, medical and other aid facilities have largely collapsed, and other institutions are also collapsing. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of people are now at risk of starvation or are already suffering terrible hunger.
Israel says it told the residents that they needed to leave northern Gaza, and even now, they can still move southward on routes the army has designated for this purpose. Thus the residents, many of whom have already been uprooted two or three times or even more from the places to which they have fled the terrors of war, are now being asked to move again. Yet Israel has refrained from giving the displaced any guarantee that they will be able to return once the war ends.
Given this, it's no wonder that grave suspicions have arisen that Israel is effectively perpetrating ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza and that this operation is intended to permanently empty this area of Palestinians.
This suspicion fits with both the principles of the "generals' plan" being pushed by Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland – a plan Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has denied implementing – and the demands of the Jewish supremacist parties in the governing coalition that are openly pursuing a policy of mass expulsions and the renewal of Jewish settlement in northern Gaza.
Ethnic cleansing is both a moral crime and a legal one. Criminal law treats mass expulsions as both a war crime and a crime against humanity. Horrifyingly, some members of Benjamin Netanyahu's government want to commit these crimes.
As soon as the war began, they began calling for "erasing Gaza" and for perpetrating a "second Nakba." But many Israelis made light of such statements, and the law enforcement system, headed by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, refrained from dealing with this incitement to commit crimes.
Now, we can see the results: Israel is sliding into ethnic cleansing; its soldiers are carrying out the criminal policies of the messianic, Kahanist right; and even the opposition on the center and center-left isn't making a peep. This consensus behind ethnic cleansing is shameful, and every public leader who doesn't demand an end to the de facto expulsion is supporting this crime and has become a party to it.
If this process doesn't stop immediately, hundreds of thousands of people will become refugees, entire communities will be destroyed and the moral and legal stain of this crime will cling to and pursue every Israel

It won't stop of course. Benji (the PM, not the canine movie star) is too intent on a wanton killing spree, and perhaps thinking of the real estate opportunities, with Mediterranean sea views.

For a repeat of what the editorial said and some relevant links, see Brett Wiklkins' piece 'If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is,' Says Israeli Newspaper of North Gaza Siege, with these closing notes:

....Israel was founded in 1948, largely through the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the Nakba, or "catastrophe." Zionist militias—the two most violent of which were led by future Israeli prime ministers—utilized terror tactics including massacres and a death march to force the Indigenous Arabs from their homeland.
Israeli ethnic cleansing continued over the following eight decades and, according to critics, currently involves home demolitions and expulsions in the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, systematic land theft, and pogroms and other violent attacks by Jewish settler colonists backed—and sometimes joined—by Israel Defense Forces troops.
United Nations officials and international human rights groups said this week's Knesset vote to ban the life-saving U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) will exacerbate Israeli crimes in Gaza, including ethnic cleansing.
"Efforts to eliminate UNRWA are illegal under international law and will only amplify the genocide and ethnic cleansing Israel is enacting in Gaza while also undermining long-term prospects for peace," the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, said Tuesday. "The Israeli government is not only deliberately blocking humanitarian and medical aid to people who are starving and dying, it is undermining support for Palestine refugees and the international legal framework protecting their rights."
On Monday, Francesca Albanese, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on Palestine, published a report "contextualizing the situation within a decades long process of territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing aimed at liquidating the Palestinian presence in Palestine."
Albanese's report was released a day after Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—who supports the "total annihilation" of Gaza and said that killing 2 million Palestinians would be "justified and moral"—reiterated his call for Israeli annexation of the entire West Bank and the expulsion of the occupied territory's Palestinians.
Israel's policies and practices in Gaza—where more than 150,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023—are the subject of an ongoing South Africa-led genocide case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Some might quibble at some of the details in that piece, but it's impossible to quibble about the mass starvation, ethnic cleansing and humanitarian disaster currently unfolding in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.

It doesn't seem appropriate to end with a few 'toons, but what the hell, toujours gai in the face of war crimes and genocide.