Israel’s war minister, Israel Katz, declared with characteristic Zionist hubris: “Gaza is burning.” His words were not a battlefield report or a measured account of military progress. They were a boast – almost celebratory – as though the incineration of a city, a gas chamber for a million human beings, were what defined Israel’s notion of military achievement. In those three words lies the distilled truth of Israel’s project since 1948: a state that has built its very identity on the destruction of Palestinian life, priding itself on the ruins of villages emptied by force and the massacres buried beneath them.
Israeli officials claim that burning Gaza will secure “victory,” just as they once said before assaulting Rafah. In 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu described the invasion of the city of Rafah as essential to achieving “total victory.” On February 10, 2024, he told This Week on ABC that “victory is within reach,” calling Rafah the “last bastion” of the Resistance. Two weeks later, in an interview with CBS, Netanyahu echoed his earlier remarks. He told Margaret Brennan that “total victory is our goal, and total victory is within reach – not months away, weeks away once we begin the operation.”
Yet, a year and a half later, and with every so-called final battle, “total victory” remains nothing more than a mirage. Netanyahu is still chasing the same phantom, shifting the goalposts from massacres to starvations, and each time, reality exposes his lies. In May 2025, he revised the definition of “total victory” to include the destruction of Gaza City, insisting: “We will achieve full victory in Gaza – total,” and claiming that “a Gaza takeover is necessary for victory.”
The scale of devastation tells the story. Gaza has been pummeled from air, sea, and land with such ferocity UN officials and residents describe it as “insane,” the scene is “nothing short of cataclysmic.” Almost half of the City’s population have been displaced, but the majority have no safe place to go.
For those who remained in the ruins under the raining Israeli bombs, escape was not an option. Families are too poor to pay for transport or even a tent. Ordered by Israel to evacuate UN designated shelters, they are enduring bombardment with no protection. “It is like escaping from death towards death, so we are not leaving,” said Um Mohammad from the Sabra neighborhood. Her words capture the bleak calculus facing Gaza’s residents: risk being entombed in rubble or on Gaza’s roads of death.
Netanyahu, beleaguered by corruption charges and flanked by Jewish nationalist ministers, has doubled down on his maximalist strategy, dismissing warnings from his own military leaders. His plan is unmistakable: prolong the war – no matter the human cost – to delay his political demise. For Netanyahu, there is nothing to lose in continuing the genocide, and everything to gain by feeding the Zionist arrogance that animates his racist government. Gaza is not a war zone; it is Netayahu’s last stand to survive Israeli politics.
The phrase, “Gaza is burning” reveals more than a military operation, it’s about an ideology. For decades, Israel has relied on fire as both weapon and metaphor: burning homes in Lydda and Deir Yassin in 1948, torching homes in the West Bank in 2025, and now reducing entire Gaza neighborhoods to dust. Each inferno is framed as a necessary act of “security,” in reality, though, it’s part of a systematic effort to erase Palestinians from the map, physically and politically.
Excerpted: ‘“Gaza Is Burning”: How Zionist Hate Fuels Genocide?’. Courtesy: Counterpunch.org