Hamas’ success in reversing the ethnic cleansing of the northern Gaza Strip has established a precedent for conditioning future ceasefires on the Right of Return.

"Israel’s" 14-month assault on the Gaza Strip has arguably been the lowest point in its 76-year existence. In the mind of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his cabinet of crazed fascists, the October 7^th attacks of 2023 provided a golden opportunity, perhaps even the last, to permanently expel the territory’s 2.4 million inhabitants and pave the way for resumed illegal settlement.

Throughout the entirety of 2024, the region was set ablaze on the altar of Netanyahu’s personal political survival. To escape accountability for his failure to avert October 7, the Prime Minister intentionally sabotaged all efforts at diplomacy, with the connivance of the Biden administration. This saw the war regionalize as it spilled over to the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen. For the political interests of a single man, Washington willingly doused what remained of its fictional “rules-based global order” and advocacy of human rights and lit the match. In allowing this, it permitted its regional attack dog to inflict unprecedented, perhaps irreversible financial and social injury to itself.

Despite continuous emphasis being placed on a “two-state solution,” the continuing displacement of Palestinians from the Nakba and the creation of "Israel" in 1947-1949 remains the ultimate root of the conflict.

Throughout the course of that period, Zionist paramilitaries, gangs, and terrorist groups who would later form the basis of the regime’s armed forces systematically depopulated around 500 towns and villages within pre-1948 Mandate Palestine. This was primarily accomplished through massacres in selected townships, such as Deir Yassin, al-Lidd, and Tantura, and poisoning of wells and vital water sources. The resulting exodus of 700,000 led to the foundation of refugee camps in neighboring Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and most crucially the West Bank and Gaza Strip where their descendants comprise most of the population.

Israeli claims that refugees left “voluntarily” due to the state of war at the time have rung hollow ever since, as it has never recognized nor implemented their right to return. The international community enshrined that right in UN Resolution 3236 in 1974 and reaffirmed it in the General Assembly every year since.

It is in this context that "Israel’s" campaign to ethnically cleanse the northern Gaza Strip, known as "the Generals’ Plan," must be viewed. As we have seen through the devastation of Gaza City, Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and others, the intent was to make the region impossible to return to.

Not only have the terms of the ceasefire of January 19 erased the occupation’s gains over the last year, they have also introduced the kind of precedent that could end the entire Zionist project much faster than anyone has recently anticipated.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, the original sites of most Palestinian towns destroyed in the original Nakba are currently empty of inhabitants. In the course of the four decades following its establishment, the Knesset introduced the “Absentee Property Law 1950,” giving itself the power to seize the property of owners no longer resident due to displacement. This has led to almost all privately-owned Palestinian land being counted as “state land.” The majority of original sites within the 1948 boundaries were progressively turned over to agriculture, closed military zones, and nature reserves. Many such areas were planted with trees to prevent refugees from returning.

Today, the highest densities of these uninhabited townsites are concentrated in the eastern Upper and Lower Galilee region and the south-west coastal plain between Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. It is no coincidence that these areas are closest to the largest refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza.

With "Israel" forced to concede the return of refugees to the North, the question may well arise, if Gazans can be allowed to return to homes which no longer exist in the northern Strip, why should returning to the sites of their own, or their elders’ original displacement be an impossibility? Living in tents amidst the rubble of Gaza is surely not qualitatively different from living amidst the ruins of their ancestral hometowns within "Israel", as far as humanitarian difficulty is concerned.

Here perhaps, the armed Palestinian Resistance may have discovered the germ of a new strategy to force the Right of Return on a regime that would never accept it voluntarily, anymore that it has voluntarily accepted the return to northern Gaza. As the escalations across the West Bank increase and Netanyahu continues to flout the ceasefire with Hezbollah in South Lebanon, forcing the Right of Return as an objective for future ceasefire negotiations might at least temporarily force Tel Aviv to tread more cautiously. At most, it would amount to the start of the long-awaited roll-back of ethnic cleansing that started three quarters of a century ago.