In October, shortly after the start of the Israeli war on Gaza that has now killed nearly 20,000 Palestinians, Israel pledged to wipe Hamas “off the face of the earth” – a project that would require Israel’s military “to flatten the ground” in Gaza, as an Israeli security source told the Reuters news agency.

And flatten they did; one month into the war, the military had already dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on the diminutive and densely populated Palestinian coastal enclave. Now, as Israel continues to pulverise an already thoroughly pulverised territory, it seems the Israelis may be taking the concept of scorched earth policy to a whole new level.

According to the Oxford Reference dictionary, the term “scorched earth policy” was first utilised in English in 1937 in a report describing the Sino-Japanese conflict, in which the Chinese levelled their own cities and burned crops in order to complicate the Japanese invasion. The strategy has since been seen in an array of armed conflicts worldwide, including the 36-year civil war in Guatemala that ended in 1996 after killing and disappearing more than 200,000 people, primarily Indigenous Mayans.

In 2013, former Guatemalan dictator and United States buddy Efraín Ríos Montt – who oversaw a particularly bloody segment of the war in the early 1980s – was found guilty of genocide in a Guatemalan court. And while subsequent........

© Al Jazeera