Israel’s Obliteration Doctrine was first tested already two decades ago, without subsequent international intervention. It has precursors, but the total devastation achieved in Gaza is world historical. As a blueprint, it is a prelude to much worse.
Not so long ago, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “nothing can justify the obliteration of Gaza that has unfolded before the eyes of the world.”
In a video, Ben Gvir points to the obliteration: “This is how it’s supposed to look.”
Israeli Minister Ben-Gvir and the footage captioned: “The Israel Prison Service placed photos of destroyed Gaza in the terrorists’ wings — so they understand that you don’t mess with the people of Israel!”
Source: (Screen capture/ Courtesy Office of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir)
As I show in my new book The Obliteration Doctrine, the ultimate objective of obliteration is the total destruction of something so that nothing of it remains.
But actually, this hellish nightmare was first tested already two decades ago.
The test laboratory of Dahiya, Beirut
The pioneering Obliteration Doctrine was first outlined in 2005 by Gadi Eizenkot, former chief of General Staff. Interestingly, he is no extremist. Subsequently an influential Israeli military leader and politician, Eisenkot supports Israeli democracy and a two-state solution. But as a military strategist, he opened the Pandora’s Box that both Israel’s right-wing Likud and Messianic far-right would subsequently embrace – and he resigned from Netanyahu’s war cabinet only after its darkest destruction.
Two decades ago, Eisenkot’s strategy was based on the idea that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) would have to severely damage Dahiya to create effective deterrence against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. His predecessor had been compelled to quit for having been “too cautious.” The assumption was that the deployment of disproportionate power would end Hezbollah for good, or at least for a sustained period.
When the IDF embraced the nascent Obliteration Doctrine, the Cold War was history and ad hoc international criminal tribunals had been set up. The Genocide Convention was in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the UN even had its special adviser with a mandate for warning the UN on the Prevention of Genocide. So, ostensibly, things were in place to deal with a military doctrine that explicitly targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure.
Yet, when Eisenkot stated in public that Israel would embrace a new military doctrine—that of extreme disproportion which virtually ensured genocidal atrocities—there was no consequential international outcry, not to speak of intervention. It was this silence that made a war of total obliteration a matter of time rather than a matter of principle.
Piloting the Obliteration Doctrine in Dahiya, Beirut
Source: Wikimedia
Civilian devastation as strategic objective
Armed with the Obliteration Doctrine, the IDF deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure to wreak massive suffering on the civilian population, presumably seeking to establish an effective deterrence. Following the 2006 Lebanese War, the doctrine was deployed again in the 2008–2009 Gaza War, which caused the deaths of 1,200–1,400 Palestinians. Over 46,000 homes were destroyed, making more than 100,000 people homeless. As Eisenkot saw it:
What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which shots will be fired in the direction of Israel. We will wield disproportionate power and cause immense damage and destruction.
After these efforts, the Obliteration Doctrine was effectively in place. Civilian devastation was no longer unfortunate collateral damage, but the very focus of a new military doctrine. So, 17 years before October 7, 2023, there was a broad public consensus among both the Israeli military and political elites that “in the next war the IDF would deploy disproportionate force” and feature heavy firepower and “immense destruction.”
Oddly enough, the very public launch of and debate on what was then described as the Dahiya strategy attracted little attention from international bodies and authorities ostensibly dedicated to genocide prevention.
“Exterminate all the brutes!”
Nonetheless, after just one month of the Gaza War, Eisenkot charged the Netanyahu cabinet for “near-criminal behavior” as the PM tried to hide protocols, leak lies to media and sway war goals to appease the Messianic far-right. With advancing obliteration, Eisenkot had lost his own son and two nephews in a war he now opposed. Yet, the doctrine that was foundational to the Obliteration Doctrine was to a great extent his handiwork.
In November 2023, Major General (Res.) Giora Eiland, former head of Israel’s National Security Council, took the doctrine even further, arguing as the Messianic far-right had done since the days of rabbi Meir Kahane and the ultra-nationalist rabbis in the 1970s, that since most Gazans support Hamas, all Gaza women are the mothers, sisters, and spouses of Hamas murderers. So, Israel was not only entitled but morally obligated to ignore their pain.
In this view, collective punishment was not a violation of international law or a perverse moral code. Somewhat like Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness (1899), Eiland seemed to concur: “Exterminate all the brutes!”
It was the ultimate ethical dictum of inhumanity. Just as the Nazis evoked collective punishment against Jews, Poles, Communists and gypsies in the 1940s, Eiland seized on it to suggest that what the military might not achieve, biowarfare could: “Epidemics in the South [of Gaza] will bring victory closer and will decrease casualties among IDF soldiers.”
These arguments unleashed a broad Israeli and international condemnation, but they were aligned with the strategic objectives of the Obliteration Doctrine.
Origins of the Obliteration Doctrine
In historical view, the kind of obliteration seen in Gaza in 2023–2025 is reminiscent of scorched-earth policy, a longstanding military strategy of destroying everything that allows an enemy military force to fight a war, including the critical infrastructure, military and state institutions, buildings, crops, livestock, security and so on. 20th century examples feature the American Civil War and American Indian Wars, and Nazi Germany’s war against the Soviet Union.
Yet, the Obliteration Doctrine goes further insofar as it aims at either devastating the entire infrastructure of the target population or destroying it, to achieve “voluntary” mass displacement, dispossession and ultimately extermination.
Another historical component of the Obliteration Doctrine is collective punishment, which violates the principle of individual responsibility since it targets individuals who are not responsible for the perpetrated acts. By the same token, it undermines modern legal systems, which restrict criminal liability to individuals. Yet, it has been widely deployed throughout history, particularly in postwar anti-colonial liberation struggles.
The third historical element of the Obliteration Doctrine is civilian victimization, or the purposeful use of violence against non-combatants in a conflict. It has featured lethal force, including killings, and non-lethal forms of violence, such as forced expulsion, torture, and rape, as evidenced by the US Strategic Hamlet program during the Vietnam War.
The deployment of scorched-earth policy against non-combatants is banned under the 1977 Geneva Conventions. Collective punishment is prohibited in both international and non-international armed conflicts. Civilian victimization is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
Yet, thanks to support by Washington and inactivity by Brussels, Israel has been able to ignore all these prohibitions.
Massive indiscriminate area bombardment
Since the postwar era, obliteration has also been accompanied by largely indiscriminate, massive area bombardment. In Gaza, one of the most densely inhabited areas in the world, it set a historical precedent. Since October 7, 2023, the US spent at least $22.8 billion on military aid to Israel and related US operations in the region.
Based on its historical precursors, massive bombardment and the deployment of artificial intelligence to maximize death and devastation, the result was the Obliteration Doctrine. By late April 2024, after barely half a year of hostilities, Israel had dropped over 70,000 tons of bombs over Gaza, surpassing the World War II bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined.
Scale of Gaza’s Obliteration = Hamburg + London + Dresden
Source: Wikimedia
The scale of destruction in Gaza has been viable only with the incessant flow of US weapons, guaranteed by U.S. military aid and funding to finance it. This aid is a result of half a century of bilateral military cooperation in the dark shadows of history, starting with Israel’s military ties with apartheid South Africa and participation in the US “Dirty Wars” in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and even Asia since the 1970s and ’80s.
The targets in Gaza are typical of the kind of mass atrocities and infrastructural devastation that is covered by the Genocide Convention. Worse, by most accounts, more than two-thirds of the perished in Gaza are women, children and elderly – and the final figure is likely to prove significantly higher.
Erasing Gaza, expunging nations
As I demonstrate in The Obliteration Doctrine, the eradication of Gaza has been predicated on a deliberately targeted campaign with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians and the Palestinian people as a national, ethnical, and religious group. This purposeful obliteration ranges from physical devastation of critical infrastructure, urban hubs and settlements, public buildings and hospitals, to both combatants and non-combatants and the entire ecology of the environment, with Gaza devastated and uninhabitable and over 62,000 Palestinians killed and almost 160,000 injured.
Another aspect of the goal of obliteration suggests a more figurative eradication: removing something from memory. Hence, the Israeli obliteration of Palestinian museums, libraries, institutions of learning, arts and culture; or what Raphael Lemkin used to call “cultural genocide.” Out of sight, out of mind, gone forever.
Third, the Obliteration Doctrine has gone hand in hand with the concerted effort to curtail, reverse or undo future development, and thus entirely undermine all economic progress. The net impact has affinities with de-development and undevelopment, as evidenced by the plummeting of Gaza’s GDP by more than 80 percent already in mid-2024.
In the big picture, the obliteration of Gaza and the efforts to eradicate and cleanse its Palestinian residents in real time with “the whole world watching,” reflects the West’s long and dark track-record of neo-colonial mass civilian destruction.
But what has happened in Gaza won’t stay in Gaza. Left unrestrained, the Obliteration Doctrine is likely to serve as a prelude to new and far more destructive genocidal atrocities in the future.
The author of The Fall of Israel (2024) and The Obliteration Doctrine (2025), Dr Dan Steinbock, a renowned visionary of the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/
A version of the commentary was published by TRT World on August 26, 2025. It features some excerpts from Dr. Dan Steinbock’s The Obliteration Doctrine.
