Weekly Briefing: Israel exported its method of destruction from Gaza to Lebanon and Iran with the U.S.’s help

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich toured the Lebanese border and vowed that "very soon, Dahiya will look like Khan Younis [in southern Gaza]."

“When Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich toured the Lebanese border this week and vowed that “very soon, Dahiya will look like Khan Younis [in southern Gaza],” he was publicly acknowledging that the genocide in Gaza is now Israel’s model for violence across the region”

Mondoweiss

Mondoweiss’s Palestine News Director Faris Giacaman said this publicly acknowledged that the genocide in Gaza has become Israel’s model for regional violence.

Mondoweiss

Giacaman names this the "Gaza doctrine."

He describes it as an evolution from the intermittent Dahiya doctrine into a strategy of protracted wholesale annihilation with no defined endpoint and no pretense of proportionality.

The article notes Israeli Defense Minister Katz has described a "tornado plan" to destroy Tehran, targeting sites of "high visibility in a civilian environment."

The article reports that schools have been struck in southwest Tehran.

It says the Gaza doctrine has gone regional, as seen in mass evacuation orders for Beirut’s southern neighborhoods.

Mondoweiss’s Editor-in-Chief Yumna Patel argues the war happened because "Israel wanted it to happen" and because the United States has constructed a relationship in which American foreign policy is subordinate to Israeli strategic ambition.

The article cites Secretary of State Marco Rubio as having admitted that the United States entered the war on Iran because it knew Israel was going to attack anyway and calculated it would take fewer American casualties by going first.

Mondoweiss

Patel’s framing in the piece is explicit: Israel is not an ally or partner but "a client state" that has set the regional agenda, with the U.S. dutifully following.

The article says Israel used the cover of the Iran war to accelerate the destruction of Palestinian life.

“When Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich toured the Lebanese border this week and vowed that “very soon, Dahiya will look like Khan Younis [in southern Gaza],” he was publicly acknowledging that the genocide in Gaza is now Israel’s model for violence across the region”

Mondoweiss

When the war on Iran began, Israel closed the crossings into Gaza and cut off all aid, and famine that had briefly receded is returning.

In the West Bank, residents describe conditions of "deliberate strangulation" as checkpoints close and movement is restricted.

Mondoweiss characterizes this as the Gaza doctrine applied across the entire Palestinian population.

The piece argues Gaza was the perfection of longstanding practice and is now being scaled up regionally with U.S. air power behind it.

The article also notes polls show most Americans across party lines do not support the war.

It calls for a growing movement demanding accountability for the U.S.–Israel relationship and an end to the genocide, which Mondoweiss says is the work it is dedicated to explaining.