As a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, Hossam Shabat has seen much more carnage and suffering in the past year than most of us will witness in our entire lifetimes.
On Wednesday morning, for instance, he documented an Israeli bombing in the Jabalia Al-Balad area that left 15 dead (including children) and over 20 injured.
“The world welcomes the New Year with celebrations,” he wrote in Arabic on the social media platform X. “We welcome 2025 with the first massacre in the Gaza Strip.”
Fourteen hours after that, he posted a video filmed at Nasser Hospital in the wake of another Israeli atrocity in the supposed “safe zone” of Mawasi Khan Yunis, which includes graphic images of a child with both of his legs blown completely off.
On Thursday morning, Shabat summarized the profound psychological effect these types of atrocities — and the countless other horrors inflicted by the genocidal Israeli regime — are having on the remaining Palestinians of Gaza:
“I’m not exaggerating when I say that 99% of the people I talk to just want to die and think that death will finally give them a rest from all this,” he said. “The Israeli government has created hell on earth for the people of Gaza.”
This — deliberately creating “hell” on earth for Gaza’s civilian population — is exactly what Daniella Weiss, director of the Israeli settler organization Nachala, discussed and condoned in an interview with BBC News’ Orla Guerin that was published in April of 2024:
She told Guerin that “Arabs will not stay” in Gaza and will be replaced by Jews. “Africa is big. Canada is big. The world will absorb the people of Gaza.”
“How will we do it?” she continued. “We encourage it.”
When Guerin asked what happens to the Palestinians who want to stay in Gaza, Weiss repeatedly insisted that “The Arabs want to go.”
Her reason? “Normal people don’t want to live in hell.”
Guerin: “What you’re talking about sounds like a plan for ethnic cleansing.”
Weiss: “You can call it ethnic cleansing, you can call it refugees, whatever you want… apartheid… you choose your definition…”
For those who don’t know, Weiss isn’t just some random Israeli. Below is an edit of some of CNN and Channel 4’s coverage of a conference she organized in early 2024.
Speakers included Itamar Ben-Gvir (national security minister) and Bezalel Smotrich (finance minister).
CNN has called her the “godmother of the Zionist settler movement.”
As seen around the 0:47 mark in the video above, she freely admits that deliberately withholding humanitarian aid is one of the “methods” they’re using to ethnically cleanse Gaza (i.e., to create the “hell” on earth that she speaks of).
Weiss: “There will be no Arabs in the Gaza Strip. . . .and we’ll use different methods; one of them is not to give them any humanitarian aid, so the countries of the world will have pity on them and take them.”
Later in the video, she says that her organization gets funding and support from very “prominent” and “wealthy Jews” in the US.
In August of 2024, the Israeli publication Haaretz reported that the IDF had already “taken control of 26% of the Gaza Strip,” and that Israel’s so-called “war against Hamas” (genocide) has “turned into a springboard for Jewish settlement in Gaza.” They discussed “support within the army for settling Gaza” —“a phenomenon that can be seen on the ground”— including among senior officers, and noted that “the settlement endeavor also has significant support within Israel’s political leadership.”
If Weiss, her benefactors, and their allies in the Israeli government have their way, however, Gaza is only the beginning.
In 2019, she told Haartez’s Bradley Burston:
WEISS: “I want to have for the Jewish nation the promised land from the Bible… from the Euphrates to the Nile…”
Q: “What about southern Lebanon?”
WEISS: “If it’s—It is part of it! All of it! Even parts of Syria, part of Iraq, part of Iran. It’s huge!”
Daniella Weiss, director of the Israeli settler organization Nachala, told CNN that she had no plans of resettling Gaza before Oct 7.
Any geographers out there wanna explain where Gaza’s located in relation to the Nile and Euphrates rivers?
For a primer on this subject — the Israeli plan to “conquer” huge swaths of the Arab world, “take possession of the land,” and build a so-called “Greater Israel” — see BreakThough News’ video, “Greater Israel Explained.”