Israel has launched a new plan for Gaza which could induce ethnic cleansing and advance a genocide, say experts.
Israel’s far-right government has approved a “plan” to carve up and ethnically cleanse Gaza, analysts told media.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the plan, couching it in claims that its goal is to dismantle Hamas and retrieve the 24 or so living captives taken from Israel on October 7, 2023.
Asserting that the “powerful operation in Gaza” was necessary, he went on to emphasise that “there will be a movement of the population to protect it.”
Here’s what you need to know:
Israel will expel hundreds of thousands of hungry Palestinians from the north of Gaza and confine them in six encampments.
It says food will be provided to the Palestinians in these encampments, and that it will allow aid groups and private security contractors to distribute it. Palestinians will be forced to move – or starve.
Israel says it will use facial recognition to identify people picking up food parcels, to deny aid to “Hamas” – yet Israel treats every fighting-age male as a Hamas operative.
The private security companies from the United States would also guard within the designated areas.
Experts and UN agencies are decrying the plan as impractical and inhumane.
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza continues, and Palestinians will continue to suffer.
Since Israel began its war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, it has cloaked its mass expulsions in what it claims are humane “advance warnings” in which families have mere hours to pack their belongings and flee to a zone Israel determines. Israel often bombs those safe zones anyway.
What is this ‘plan’?
“If you are viewing this plan through aid distribution, it makes no sense,” Diana Buttu, legal scholar and former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization, told media.
“If you view it through a political project, which is ethnic cleansing and cantonisation by using food as a weapon of war, then this plan does make sense,” she said, adding that the “plan” is consistent with Israel’s aim of carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
“What more does Netanyahu want? We’re dying in every way.”
Mahmoud al-Nabahin, 77, who has been displaced for the past 18 months, says Netanyahu’s threats are meaningless.
He has lost everything; Israel killed his wife and daughter in a raid months ago, and their home and farm are gone.
“[This] means nothing but our annihilation. We’ve lost all hope. Let him do whatever he wants,” he says from his tent in Deir el-Balah.
“We don’t have weapons. We’re civilians left in the wind. People will refuse displacement, but will be forced by the army.”
They want to finish their genocide under the guise of facilitating food aid and rescuing Israeli captives, Omar Rahman, an expert on Israel-Palestine for the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, said.
“Israel has been telegraphing its real intentions from the start of this campaign: Destroy Gaza and eliminate its population both by starvation and mass killing,” he said.
Israel’s “plan” signals its intent to starve Palestinians who resist being expelled from north Gaza, said Heidi Matthews, a legal scholar at York University, Canada.
“It is inconceivable that the population can be adequately provided for … whilst being crowded into southern Gaza,” she said.
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