Last week’s elections might see Netanyahu lose power, but Israel has the Occupied Palestinian Territory in an ever-tightening vice, and potential new PM Gadi Eisenkot won’t change that. Cathy Peters with the reality check.
To oppressed Palestinians, a change of Israel’s leader will mean very little.
Israel’s relentless dispossession and subjugation of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and its ongoing genocide in Gaza, will continue under a government led by former military general and IDF Chief of Staff, Gadi Eisenkot.
Eisenkot spent four decades in the military, joining the notorious Golani Brigade in 1978 and moving through the ranks to become head of the IDF. He was invited to join Netanyahu’s war cabinet as a minister without portfolio after October 7, 2023. His stance in opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu is political, not philosophical.
Eisenkot’s legacy – the Dahiya Doctrine
Eisenkot has a brutal military legacy. As a general in Israel’s 2006 34-day war with Hezbollah, he developed the Dahiya Doctrine, a strategy which calls for the use of overwhelming disproportionate force and the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure.
It was named after the brutal attack on the Dahiya area in southern Beirut where Hezbollah was headquartered. Between 1,000 and 1,200 Lebanese people (mostly civilians) were killed, and roughly one million Lebanese were displaced.
The methodology that allowed 2,000-pound bombs and similar weapons to flatten a whole section of Beirut was described by Eisenkot a couple of years later:
“What happened in the Dahieh 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. From our perspective, these are military bases. […] This isn’t a suggestion. It’s a plan that has already been authorized. […] Every one of the Shiite villages is a military site, with headquarters, an intelligence center, and a communications center…”
These comments were used in the 2009 Goldstone Report on Israel’s Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), in which 1,400 Palestinians were killed, including 300 children. Goldstone later retracted some of the findings of deliberate targeting of civilians through excessive force, although the Report’s other three co-authors stood by the findings.
Eisenkot stated in this video that he would in future use ‘softer words’ due to being exposed in the Goldstone Report.
This doctrine can be seen to be at the heart of Israel’s attacks on Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014 and now from 2023, as large swathes of Gaza have been completely flattened and 2 million Palestinians have been displaced, now surviving in conditions inflicted on them by Israel which are barbaric.
Israel’s ‘Facts on the Ground’ – razing Gaza and South Lebanon
Lebanon
Southern Lebanon has been the victim of Eisenkot’s Dahiya Doctrine again in recent years, with the extensive destruction of civilian structures and agricultural land between 2024 and 2026.
According to Amnesty,
“The destruction was carried out by the Israeli military with manually laid explosives and bulldozers both before and after a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah that took effect on 27 November 2024… The visual evidence shows that Israeli troops deliberately left a trail of destruction as they moved through southern Lebanon. Among the structures affected are homes, mosques, cemeteries, roads, parks and football pitches. In one village, satellite imagery showed the Star of David, a Jewish symbol, carved into the ground.”
Since April this year, more than 90,000 homes and scores of border villages in Southern Lebanon and beyond this area have been razed, with millions left as refugees in their own country.
Eisenkot’s Dahiya Doctrine is the modus operandi of the IDF. Israel has shown it does not countenance the principle of proportionality in warfare,
nor the protection of civilians or civilian infrastructure.
West Bank
Israel closed all land crossings throughout the West Bank on October 27, the day of the Israeli election; however, it has severely restricted the movement of the 3.4 million Palestinians living in this area and in East Jerusalem for many decades.
Armed settler attacks have increased exponentially in recent years, and these attacks intensified in the past weeks during the annual olive harvest. European politicians and US Congressman Brad Lander were blocked or arrested last month as the IDF sanctioned and supported the extremist actions of the Israeli thugs throughout the militarily occupied West Bank.
According to Israel’s largest human rights organisation, B’tselem, at least 66 Palestinian rural communities have been forcibly displaced by settlers since 2023.
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On October 25, the whole city of Hebron was put under an 11-day siege, with the city and surrounding areas blocked off after two Palestinian gunmen shot and killed two Israeli soldiers at a military checkpoint. Subsequently, the army brought in bulldozers to destroy hundreds of homes in the area where the gunmen lived.
According to Medical Aid for Palestine some 3000 Palestinians were displaced with those returning to their homes finding them partially destroyed and ransacked. The Hebron governorate has a population of just under 885,000, all of whom were affected by the extra punitive movement restrictions imposed by the IDF, which imposed an additional 128 gates and 120 checkpoints during this siege, according to Hebron’s Governor, Khaled Dudin.
An aid worker in Hebron described the sudden displacement:
“It happened all of a sudden and was unexpected to see this kind of mass forced displacement. Over 3,000 individuals have been displaced, including persons with disabilities, pregnant women, children. They left their homes carrying whatever they could. A lot of those who were displaced are elderly people with chronic illnesses”. Many were forced at gunpoint to leave their homes in the Ein Deir Baha and Farsh al-Hawa neighbourhoods in the middle of the night while
the Israel Defence Force (IDF) targeted homes, businesses, industrial sites and infrastructure.
This collective punishment of entire populations and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is not new, but its severity in the West Bank has intensified as the IDF and settlers have been emboldened by the impunity given to Israel during the Gaza genocide.
In early 2025, just after the Gaza ‘ceasefire’ agreement, Israel embarked on ‘Operation Iron Wall’ in which some 40,000 residents in refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams in the northern West Bank were forced to evacuate. The UN described this as
the longest and largest displacement crisis in the West Bank since 1967.
Between October 2023 and October 2026, Israel has terrorised the population of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and made approximately 26,000 arrests.
Gaza crisis worsens
Just prior to the first intense storm in Gaza, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza called on the international community to ‘intervene immediately to lift restrictions on the entry of humanitarian relief supplies and all types of goods and commodities.’
This was in light of Israel’s continued restriction of essential humanitarian and commercial supplies into the Gaza Strip through the Kerem Shalom Crossing, the only entry point allowed for goods into Gaza to support 2 million people. Malnutrition and starvation rates in Gaza have reached “catastrophic” levels, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The rain falling on Gaza is not the cause of the humanitarian catastrophe. It is exposing it.
Three years of Israeli destruction have erased homes, drainage systems and essential infrastructure, forcing more than two million Palestinians into an ever-smaller area of land. Now, seasonal rainfall floods the tents in which people have been forced to seek refuge and threatens buildings already damaged by bombardment.
Our spatial analysis traces this transformation, mapping the destruction of buildings alongside the expansion and changing geography of tent camps. It reveals the spatial reorganisation of Gaza through the destruction of permanent shelter and the forced displacement of its population.
What is unfolding is not simply a failure to protect civilians from the elements. It is the destruction of the material conditions necessary for Palestinian life. This is inseparable from the ongoing genocide.
— Forensic Architecture (@ForensicArchi) November 10, 2026
The severe restriction on all forms of shelter since 2023 has meant that the flimsy tents housing huge numbers of Palestinians are now flooding due to the first winter storms. 26,000 tents and shelters have failed, leaving families freezing with no dry mattresses, bedding or clothes.
According to the International Rescue Committee, as of November 1, families still needed about 121,000 tents, 561,000 tarpaulins, 57,000 emergency shelter kits and 1.7 million mattresses. This committee noted that aid groups had about 2,800 tents in stock inside Gaza and no emergency shelter kits.
Killing protesters
In April-May 2018, when Palestinians in Gaza mounted a massive, peaceful protest at five sites along the Gaza fence perimeter known as the Great March of Return, Eisenkot, then Lieutenant-General of the IDF, deployed 100 sharpshooters and gave them permission to fire on unarmed protesters.
The UN Inquiry into Israel’s actions found that 183 Palestinians had been killed by snipers and 6,106 injured with live ammunition. Another 3,098 were injured by bullet fragmentation, rubber-coated metal bullets or by hits from tear gas canisters.
An Israeli government led by Gadi Eisenkot
will not take action to stop this genocide, ethnic cleansing and ongoing war crimes.
Eisenkot has declared he needs to form a National Emergency Government and has already ruled out any coalition with the Arab (Palestinian) Parties who achieved an historic number of seats in the election.
He has, however, offered to form a government with members of Netanayhu’s Likud party and another ICC-indicted war criminal, Bezalel Smotrich, and his party, the Religious Zionist Party, which partners with two ultra-Orthodox parties, United Torah Judaism and Shas.
These politicians are the perpetrators. Change will not come from within Israel. The international community must act decisively to stop Israel’s crimes.
Francesca Albanese UN Report: Media Complicit in Gaza Genocide | The West Report
Cathy Peters is a former ABC RN producer/executive producer and Greens councillor on the former Marrickville Council. She also worked for a state Greens MP and is a long-time advocate for Palestinian rights. In 2014, she co-founded PSNA / BDS Australia. She has Jewish heritage, has travelled and volunteered in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.