Thank you for your question. To really simplify the answer, no, Israel has never sought to annihilate Gaza or its people. Any pro-Israel activity calling to end Gaza is very rare and not consistent with what most Israelis (including myself) want.
There has been a *very successful* anti-Israel propaganda campaign from terrorist groups ever since WWII ended, spearheaded by Mufta al-Husseini (a friend of Hitler) and tailored to appeal to progressive intellectuals in the west. The “Gaza genocide” is common knowledge now, but there is simply not enough unbiased evidence to support it.
Many claim that there has been a genocide “for 80 years,” yet Gazan population has gone from 80,000 to 2 million, not consistent with ~80 years~ of genocide. At least not a successful one.
In fact before the recent war started by Hamas, most Gazans just… lived their lives. It was a beautiful piece of land. Roughly 150,000 Gazans crossed into Israel every day for work (and that will no longer be allowed probably, because a few of them turned out to be scoping and mapping the area that would later be the site of the 10/07 attacks). There was no IDF presence there. There were no Jewish residents since 2005, because, well, they didn’t want them and Israel agreed to yank them out. Again before the recent war, Israel accepted 1000-2000 Palestinian citizens a year. They, along with roughly 2 million other Israeli Arabs, have equal rights and opportunities (Meanwhile in the West Bank, a Palestinian faces the death penalty if they sell property to a Jew.). A very small handful of these Israeli-Palestinian citizens committed terrorist attacks on Jews over the years (look up the 2015 Palestinian attacks, as an example. I was there, watching it unfold on the news). There is a border around Gaza because of a history of suicide bombers and other attackers crossing over to hurt civilians. I was also there in the 90’s when that was a common problem. I was scared to take the bus to school, because buses were popular targets.
Meanwhile, Hamas put a foothold on Gaza and started firing unprovoked rockets into civilian areas in Israel, since they couldn’t easily cross the border anymore to plant bombs. They’ve been doing this for 20 years. Then they found a way to cross over en masse and rape/slaughter 1200 noncombatant people (I’m sure you know that story at least).
It turns out that the decades of propaganda over Israel’s alleged horrendous treatment of Gazans gave them billions of dollars in aid to build tunnels and rockets.
Hamas continued to send rockets from hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings so that IDF retaliatory rockets would hit civilians. Then they plaster it all over social media - look what Israel did! Then they continue firing rockets over and over and over again. They continue hanging on to the remaining 101 hostages, at least half of whom are dead.
Meanwhile, the IDF utilizes pamphlets and alerts and sirens and all kinds of methods to clear out civilians before they bomb an area. Not exactly “annihilation” behavior.
Why are they displacing upwards of at least a million Gazans from their homes? Because Hamas built tunnels and weapons under them. For the sole purpose of killing Israelis. So yeah, the IDF wants to put a stop to that. As would any normal army from a normal country.
Reliable sources put the combatant - to - civilian ratio at around 1:1 - 1:2.5, which is extremely low. For a dense urban area, average is 1:9.
Looking at it another way - there are about 300,000 IDF soldiers in Gaza right now. They have superior weapons, they have air space. That’s 100 times the number of Hamas members involved in 10/07. So if they killed Gazans with the same unhinged violence as Hamas did in one day … 100 times the soldiers leading to 100 times the deaths, over 400 days… They would have killed over ~20x the population in Gaza by now.
So between the population growth, the forcible removal of Jewish residents from Gaza in 2005, the multiple offers for a two state solution denied by Hamas, the fact that Israel has never sent a rocket first (and you can look that up), the distribution of aid, and the care taken to minimize civilian death in an extremely urban strip of land as small as Manhattan, there doesn’t seem to be an annihilation goal.
Are they capable of annihilating all Gazans? Yes. They’re a powerful military. But they haven’t so far. And I never see accurate or unbiased information to prove otherwise. What I HAVE seen is footage of Hamas torturing Gazans and shooting at people for trying to flee areas that the IDF warned them they would strike.
Let me be clear that I am in no way minimizing the suffering and death of Gazans, especially considering that children make up such a large number of the population. I’ve seen that footage too. It’s awful. It doesn’t have to be labeled a genocide to be horrific. War is horrific.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend that every IDF member is free from sin, that would be foolish and naive, but to spread misinformation about the war is to embolden terrorists and keep them throwing their own citizens in harm’s way for the sake of killing Jews. Yes, I believe that a large part of the pro-Palestine movement is harming both sides.
We don’t want Gaza. (Egypt didn’t even want Gaza when offered). We want people to stop using it to terrorize us. We continue to receive 100+ rockets a day from Hamas and Hezbollah. One of them hit a kindergarten today.
You are welcome to ask me more questions as long as it doesn’t come from a hostile place.