Seymour Hersh: The Plan to Wipe Out Hamas [hard paywall]

TL;DR: Flatten the buildings and then use upgraded American bunker buster bombs, which may or may not be able to penetrate deep enough. And then ultimately, “The Israeli hope is that Qatar and Egypt will take the refugee crisis off its hands.”

In other words, Israel’s Final Solution to the Gaza Palestinian Question is ethnic cleansing.

The systematic destruction of the remaining buildings in Gaza City will start within days, the Israeli insider said. The bunker-buster JDAMs could come next. Then, in the planners’ scenario, I was told, the Israeli infantry will be assigned to mop-up operations: searching out and killing those Hamas fighters and workers who managed to survive the JDAM attacks.

The major issue for the Israeli war planners is a reluctance, despite the mobilization of more than 300,000 reservists, to engage in a door-to-door street battle with Hamas in Gaza City. One veteran of the IDF, who served in a high post, told me that half of the Israeli Army has been engaged for the past decade or more in the protection of the increasing number of small settlements scattered in the West Bank where they are bitterly resented by the Palestinian population. “The Israeli planners don’t trust their infantry,” the insider said, nor their willingness to go to war but what could be a disastrous lack of combat experience.