Qassam Muaddi
Israel
carried out its plan to erase Gaza over the course of 18 months. Now that the
plan has clearly fallen into place, the Netanyahu government is openly
discussing ethnic cleansing. And still, Israel enjoys complete international
impunity.
Aerial view of the destruction in Rafah on January 19, 2025, during the
start of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. (Photo: Omar
Ashtawy/APA Images)
It has been a
year since Israel first invaded Rafah and crossed Biden’s illusory “red line.”
The Israeli army destroyed the Rafah crossing, isolating Gaza from Egypt and
completely cutting it off from the outside world. Israel was free to conduct
the mass displacement of Palestinians away from the Egyptian border, but it
never admitted to that goal.
But now, Rafah
is no more, and Israel’s recently approved plan to reoccupy Gaza indefinitely
has made explicit what many have already expected for months: that the ulterior
motive of creating permanent military installations and buffer zones in Gaza is
to facilitate the mass expulsion of Palestinians.
Israel is now
openly announcing its intentions and publicly advertising ethnic cleansing as
“voluntary migration.” This didn’t happen overnight, but has been the result of
a slow, deliberate process of hemming Palestinians into concentrated
sub-ghettoes under fire while creating vast military buffer zones on swathes of
flattened Gazan territory. The plan has been implemented in piecemeal over the
past 18 months, but now those pieces are falling clearly into place.
Just last week,
Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel’s main war aim of “defeating its
enemies” superseded the goal of releasing Israeli captives in Gaza, echoing
previous statements from his Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, the so-called
hardliner.
This isn’t a
new development. It has been Israel’s plan all along, but the Israeli
government has had to stagger its implementation over the course of a year and
a half due to a series of internal and external constraints. Yet it continued
to set the stage for ethnic cleansing every step of the way.
The watershed
moment came in February during the short-lived ceasefire between Israel and
Hamas, when U.S. President Trump articulated his shocking plan for the U.S. to
“own” Gaza and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” while the people of
Gaza would be relocated elsewhere. Suddenly, the President of the United States
was endorsing a plan that Israel had never dared voice in public. Even a month
earlier, Netanyahu had said in a televised statement that “Israel has no
intention of permanently reoccupying Gaza or displacing its civilian
population.”
This is the
exact plan that the Israeli war cabinet has just approved.
Since Trump
made his February statement, which he later walked back, Israel has been
emboldened to go full steam ahead with its plan. The resumption of the war and
the blowing up of the ceasefire are partly informed by this newfound
determination to see through Israel’s “final solution” for the Gaza question.
The reason it is able to do it is because the international community has
barely lifted a finger to stop it.
But Trump’s
February announcement was not where Israel’s strategy to take over the strip
and displace its people originated. Well before Israel was forced by Trump to
enter into the ceasefire with Hamas, the army had thrown all its force behind a
military plan proposed by a cohort of Israeli generals based on an earlier
vision laid out by retired Israeli general Giora Eiland. Dubbed “the Generals’
Plan,” its aim was to completely depopulate northern Gaza through siege and
starvation. The implementation of the plan included completely sealing off the
400,000 Palestinians residing in the area and leaving them without food, water,
or medicine; a non-stop wave of demolitions and detonations of residential
buildings and houses; widespread carpet-bombing; and the direct, forcible
evacuation of schools-turned-shelters and hospitals in the north.
By the time the
ceasefire was reached on January 19, the population of north Gaza had been
reduced to less than 100,000. The last functioning hospital in the area, Kamal
Adwan Hospital, was also forcibly evacuated following an 80-day siege and
several direct attacks by Israeli drones. Israeli forces also abducted several
members of the medical staff, including the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu
Safiya, who continues to be detained by Israeli forces to this day.
The Generals’
Plan failed after hundreds of thousands of Palestinians returned to the north
in a historic return march during the ceasefire, setting up camp beside the
rubble of their homes and sending a clear message that their displacement had
been anything but “voluntary.”
Israel’s plans
for realizing its solution to the “Gaza problem” had been frustrated, and it
was dragged into the ceasefire kicking and screaming. Israel continued to stall
at every stage of the ceasefire, sabotaging it at every opportunity and
refusing to enter into negotiations that would see a permanent end to the war.
It continued to bide its time, waiting for an opening. Trump gave Israel the
opening it needed in February, and Netanyahu’s war cabinet has been barreling
through all internal obstacles within the Israeli political system ever since.
How Israel
started implementing its ‘voluntary migration’ plan
In March, the
Israeli Defense Ministry approved the creation of a special bureau to promote
the expulsion of Palestinians. At the time, the ceasefire between Israel and
Hamas was still in effect, albeit tenuously, as Israel refused to move to the
second phase of the ceasefire talks, which would have involved negotiations
over permanently ending the war. Five days after the ceasefire broke, U.S.
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was still saying that the idea of
transferring Palestinians was “practical” and “realizable.”
Then, in early
April, Israel revealed the carving out of a new militarized strip of land south
of Khan Younis called the Morag Corridor, cutting off the southernmost Rafah
governorate from the rest of Gaza. Everything south of Morag, including all of
Rafah, was announced as part of a military buffer zone, reducing the surface of
the Palestinian enclave by a fifth. This was made possible by Israel’s
intensified bombing and demolition campaign of Rafah since the Israeli army
invaded the governorate in May 2024, leveling all of the city’s infrastructure.
Israel’s
Channel 12 reported that the aim of the Morag Corridor was to facilitate the
“voluntary migration” of Palestinians, while Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel
Katz, announced in a televised statement that the Israeli army was “cutting
off” the continuity of the Gaza Strip and implementing the voluntary migration
plan. Katz reiterated this plan weeks later, stating that Israel’s strategy in
Gaza included destroying infrastructure, blocking the entry of humanitarian
aid, and “promoting voluntary transfer.”
Who is
responsible?
Since the
beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Israel has revealed parts of its final
plan in stages. At the start of the genocide, then Defense Minister Yoav
Gallant said Israel was imposing a “total siege” on Gaza, preventing the entry
of food, water, electricity, or fuel, and labeling Palestinians as “human
animals.” The genocidal implications of the war’s endgame were apparent, but
the unfolding of Israel’s plan in Gaza continued to be concealed politically by
endless rhetoric about ceasefire talks, and even the release of Israeli
captives. The Israeli government now makes no pretenses of the captives’
importance, after officially moving them to the bottom of the priority list of
the war’s goals.
Every step of
the way, Israel has met no practical consequences for its escalation, and no
government with any leverage over Israel has moved to impose any political
repercussions. Even the generalized official rejection by European and Arab
governments of Trump’s Gaza plan wasn’t followed by any action. And of course,
Israel’s refusal to move on to the second phase of the ceasefire and its
constant violations of the truce were met with silence. That silence continues
to be deafening as Israel carves the Morag Corridor, erases Rafah, and is now
moving to do the same thing to other parts of Gaza.
Total impunity
accompanied every one of Israel’s milestones in the march toward exterminating
Gaza, from the hundreds of bombings of schools, hospitals, aid workers,
paramedics, and journalists, to the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s population.
Now, the permanency of Israel’s occupation of Gaza is official, and so is the
stated aim of ethnically cleansing its people. And we still have no reaction.
The fact that
the silence persists as Israel’s end goals have been made clear confirms that
the extermination of Gaza was never the vision of the Israeli far-right, or
even of Netanyahu personally; it was an international decision.
This must be
the new realization that underlies any account of the destruction of
Palestinian life, including the impending Israeli annexation of the West Bank
and the full colonization of East Jerusalem, the Naqab, and any other part of
historic Palestine where the Palestinian people still struggle to preserve
their collective existence.
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