A Plan of Ash and Sand: Inside the Unraveling of Gaza and the American Complicity

5 minutes read time.

The directive arrived as it so often does in this brutal, asymmetric war: fluttering down from the sky on leaflets, a chilling promise of what was to come. “Evacuate immediately,” the Israeli military ordered the residents of Gaza City, a sprawling urban center still home to nearly a million people. But this was not just another warning; it was a prelude to what Israeli leaders promised would be the “main intensive operation.” For the rest of the world, however, the order raised a single, stark question: Where will they all go?

The answer, made devastatingly clear by satellite imagery and firsthand accounts, is as simple as it is horrifying: nowhere. The assault on Gaza City is not an isolated military operation; it is the brutal culmination of what two sitting U.S. senators now call a “systematic plan to destroy and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza,” a plan enabled by American complicity and driven by a cynical political strategy that has sabotaged peace at every turn.

The sheer impossibility of the evacuation order is a geographic and humanitarian fact. The New York Times, using satellite imagery, has painted a devastating picture of a population being systematically corralled into an ever-shrinking cage. The Israeli military directs civilians to a “humanitarian zone” in the south, claiming there are “vast empty areas” available. The satellites tell a different story. They show a two-mile-deep sea of tents already crammed into every available space, a landscape utterly devoid of the sanitation, water, and medical care needed to absorb hundreds of thousands more desperate people. The progression of the war is visible from space: the green agricultural fields of October 2023 become the sprawling tent cities of today; the once-standing buildings of Rafah are now flattened earth. The fate of those other areas is the intended fate of Gaza City. There is nowhere to go.

This physical destruction is coupled with a deliberate and systematic strangulation of humanitarian aid, a strategy that Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley have labeled “using food as a weapon of war.” Following a recent trip to the region, the two members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a scathing report detailing their findings. They documented arbitrary Israeli restrictions that have left aid groups unable to predict what will be allowed entry, with items like peanut butter, honey, and dates suddenly banned. They reported that new $400 customs fees are being levied on every aid truck, a fee that must be paid again if the truck is turned away and has to rejoin a later convoy. They toured warehouses filled with life-saving goods banned by Israel under dubious “dual-use” restrictions, including solar-powered water pumps, tents, and even wheelchairs. At the Israeli port of Ashdod, they were told that 2,200 shipping containers of food—enough to feed everyone in Gaza for three weeks—sit delayed by onerous screening procedures.

This is not collateral damage; it is a plan. As Senator Merkley described it, the strategy has two components: “One is to destroy homes so that they cannot be returned to… That second strategy is to deprive Palestinians of essentials to live, food, water, and medicine.” It is a conclusion supported by former IDF soldiers who described to the senators an “intentional pattern of using explosives to blow up whole city blocks, houses, schools, and other civilian sites.”

This systematic destruction is being carried out under the cover of a political strategy that appears laser-focused on sabotaging any and all off-ramps to peace. The recent Israeli strike on Hamas officials in Doha, Qatar—the very mediators in U.S.-backed ceasefire talks—is viewed across the Arab world as a cynical and deliberate move by Prime Minister Netanyahu to scuttle the negotiations and prolong the war. The justification offered by one Israeli official, comparing the strike to the 1972 Munich assassinations and assuming there would be no consequences, reveals a stunningly outdated belief in their own impunity. The strike was a tactical failure that killed no senior Hamas leaders, but it was a strategic success if the goal was to kill the peace process.

And this is where the story turns inward, to the profound and damning role of the United States. “We, the United States, are complicit in all of this,” Senator Van Hollen declared. “Because we’re providing taxpayer dollar support to the Netanyahu government to use weapons in Gaza.” The senators’ report is titled with a brutal clarity: The Netanyahu Government Is Implementing a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. America is Complicit. The World Must Stop It. The skepticism of the U.S. claim of “no prior knowledge” of the Qatar strike is rampant, with one analyst stating there is “no way” it wasn’t coordinated with Washington.

The final, chilling piece of the puzzle is the glimpse into the American endgame. A senior administration official, when asked about the post-war plan for Gaza, spoke of creating a “receivership,” in which the U.S. would take control to give the people a “better life.” “It is an enormous grand master plan development,” the official said. “Think of the Marshall Plan coming to Gaza.” The hubris of this statement is breathtaking. The Marshall Plan came after the total military defeat and unconditional surrender of a nation-state following a world war. To invoke its name in the context of Gaza carries the horrifying implication that a similar level of absolute devastation is seen not as a tragic outcome to be avoided, but as a necessary prerequisite for an American-led colonial-style reconstruction. It is the language of a power that believes it has the right to destroy a place in order to remake it in its own image. This is the unmanaged chaos of the post-9/11 world: a landscape of ash and sand, created by a brutal military campaign, enabled by American weapons and diplomatic cover, and justified by a delusional, imperial fantasy.