Israeli general wants Gaza ruined forever
A former Israeli general says Gaza should stay ruined for generations, as displaced families behind the Yellow Line wait for homes that won't be rebuilt.
71 families are living in tents pitched on rubble in the Ahl al-Sumud camp in Zeitoun, on Gaza City’s eastern edge. They were moved there after Israeli forces pushed the boundary of their occupation further into the city, and Ramadan Abu Ammo, who runs the camp, has watched the number climb every week since. None of the families know when, or whether, they will go home. A former Israeli general has now said, on the record, that he wants Gaza destroyed for generations, exactly how he wants it to stay.
Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel’s National Security Council, told the Israeli radio station 103FM this month that rebuilding Gaza is against Israel’s interest. Gaza, he said, should remain “destroyed for generations to come,” not as a side effect of the war but as its purpose. The remark was first published in Hebrew by the newspaper Maariv under the headline “Giora Eiland without filters.” There was no filter to it.
Gaza destroyed for generations, and it was deliberate Eiland’s case, laid out to 103FM, is that Palestinian despair now serves Israeli interests. The longer Gaza’s devastation stands as a “reminder” of the 7 October 2023 attack, he argued, “the better.” He dismissed the US-backed Board of Peace’s 15-point plan as a “very pro-Hamas interpretation” of the ceasefire framework, and insisted Israel must never give up the “Yellow Line,” the demarcation inside Gaza behind which Israeli forces currently sit. “We must not give up it under any circumstances,” he said. He compared the Strip to postwar Germany: the enemy has lost, he argued, and Israel needs the land.
None of this is a stray comment from a man with no record. Eiland is the architect of the “Generals’ Plan,” drawn up in 2024, which proposed ordering Palestinians out of northern Gaza and then imposing a total siege, cutting food, water, fuel and medicine, on anyone who stayed behind. In November 2023 he wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth that Israel should not be deterred by warnings of famine or epidemic, because they would “bring victory closer.” Days after the war began, in October 2023, he had already called for Gaza to become “an area where people cannot live.”
The pattern matters because it has been noticed beyond Israel. South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice has repeatedly cited Eiland’s public statements as evidence of intent. Deliberate starvation of civilians is prohibited under international humanitarian law, whoever proposes it and however senior their old job title. Eiland does not need anyone to interpret what he meant. He has published it himself, on the record, more than once, in an Israeli newspaper and now on Israeli radio.
The line he wants to keep
The territory Eiland says must never be surrendered is not an abstraction. Israel now controls roughly 70% of Gaza behind the Yellow Line, up from about half when the October 2025 ceasefire began and 64.9% as recently as June. In a single month this July the line moved 300 to 1,500 metres further into Gaza. Since the ceasefire started, monitors have recorded 3,795 Israeli violations of it and 1,168 Palestinians killed, roughly a third of them near the advancing demarcation.
Behind that line are people like Hazem Saeed in eastern Deir el-Balah and Suhail Ouda in the north, repeatedly displaced as the boundary shifts. Mohammed al-Sarsawi, head of media for Gaza’s municipality, says roughly 950,000 residents of Gaza City now live in areas his own teams cannot reach. This is the “buffer” Eiland says Israel must hold forever: occupied streets, camps that keep growing, and a city hall that cannot get to nearly a million of its own residents.
A collapsing peace process, not a vacuum
Eiland’s remarks did not land in isolation. Three days earlier, on 9 August, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet that Israel rejects the Board of Peace’s 15-point plan outright, demanding “genuine disarmament, not fictitious disarmament” from Hamas before any Israeli withdrawal. Hamas has said no such demand has been formally put to it. Senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk said the group “never agreed to disarm; no one’s raised it with us directly.”
A retired official with no current government post, Eiland never had his Generals’ Plan formally adopted as Israeli policy. But a man with his record, arguing publicly that reconstruction should be permanently withheld, is arguing directly against the plan his own prime minister has now also rejected, for related if not identical reasons. The timing is not incidental. It is a hardline defence of the ground already seized, aimed at an American-brokered process that both men, for their own reasons, want to see fail on Israel’s terms.
Who pays
There is a genuine complication worth stating plainly: UN OCHA reported on 8 August that aid entering Gaza rose 33% in July compared with June, roughly 35,000 tonnes across 55,000 pallets, about 60% of it food. That is real relief, not spin. But OCHA itself says major restrictions remain, including on the engine oil and spare parts needed to keep humanitarian vehicles and generators running. The famine the UN’s own monitoring system declared in Gaza Governorate a year ago has eased from its peak. It has not ended: 1.6 million people were still facing high food insecurity as of last month, according to reporting reviewed by the Washington Post. “There’s no real improvement in the famine case,” says Amjad Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGOs Network, “no real effort that we could see on the ground to deal with this famine situation.”
That is the gap between what Eiland has said publicly and what a former general’s opinion actually controls: he cannot order the siege lifted or held, but the man who can, Netanyahu, has just rejected the plan that would have started reconstruction, and the general who first proposed starving Gaza’s north is now arguing, in public, that starving its future is the correct policy. The families in Zeitoun’s camp are not waiting on a debate. They are waiting on a decision that a named man has already told Israeli radio he does not want made.
