Israel has unveiled a startling new plan for escalating its domination of the Gaza Strip that all but openly declares an ethnic cleansing agenda meant to permanently alter life and demography in the enclave. The signs that things were headed in this dark direction have been clear for a while. But Israel can be so plain-spoken in part because President Donald Trump is not just supporting Israel, but also celebrating neocolonialism as a legitimate foreign policy goal.
NBC News reported that Israel’s security Cabinet has “unanimously approved a plan to seize all of the Gaza Strip in what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said would be an intensive military operation aimed at defeating Hamas.” The Israeli army is calling up tens of thousands of reserve soldiers for the effort. Netanyahu said the plan to take over the territory means the Israeli military will no longer “enter and then exit” from combat zones but do the “opposite” — indefinitely control any territory it seizes. And the plan calls for a mass displacement of Gaza’s Palestinian population to the southern part of the territory. BBC News reported that far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that “an Israeli victory in Gaza would see the territory ‘entirely destroyed’ and its residents ‘concentrated’ in the south, from where they would ‘start to leave in great numbers to third countries.’” Smotrich and his colleague Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have in the past also called for new Israeli settlements in Gaza.
This is an all-out assault on human rights and the concept of self-determination.
Alongside those plans, Israel’s security Cabinet approved a plan to change the way international aid flows into Gaza, which would involve Israel wresting control of the distribution of aid from international organizations. Under the new policy, aid would be distributed through designated hubs that would, according to The Washington Post, only distribute a tenth of what Israel did during the ceasefire, would be protected by American security contractors and would use facial recognition screening. The United Nations rejected that plan as “dangerous” and described it as “designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic — as part of a military strategy.” Currently, Gaza is in the midst of its third month of a total Israeli blockade of food, fuel and medicine — and the plan to reopen (insufficient) humanitarian aid is only meant to take effect after the population is herded to the south.
Israel’s retaliation against Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, war crimes has been going on for so long and with such intensity that its conduct may have begun to feel normal to many. But it must be said that this is the stuff of nightmares. This is an all-out assault on human rights and the concept of self-determination, and the U.S. cannot claim credibility on those matters either while supporting it.
Israeli officials say there is a “window of opportunity” for a new ceasefire deal during Trump’s visit to the Middle East next week that could forestall the occupation plan, but there’s little reason to be optimistic given Netanyahu’s decision to unilaterally renege on the last one. Hamas has also said that there was “no point” to negotiations while the blockade remained in place.
Israel’s starvation and bombardment regime — which many human rights organizations, human rights experts and genocide scholars have described as genocidal — has long telegraphed an agenda to render Gaza uninhabitable and force one of two outcomes: death or displacement. But this plan of calling up reservists for indefinite occupation is new. I asked Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center Washington D.C., whether Gaza is entering a categorically new phase since Israel began its response to the Oct. 7 attacks.
“It is and isn’t. In some ways it is, because now you have the Israeli government and the security Cabinet within the Israeli government formally adopting this as a plan and making very clear their intentions to the public,” Munayyer said. “But I would also argue that this has been the intention all along, if you judge them by their actions and their lack of willingness to articulate a vision for Gaza that was different than this.”
In other words, Israel is feeling more empowered to be forthright about its endgame of making Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians.
Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project and a former Israeli peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, told me Israel has gotten here by constantly pushing the boundaries of how it can mistreat the Palestinians since Hamas' attacks and seeing what happens. “Israel has been consistently testing the waters of what it could get away with, whether impunity is still in place,” Levy wrote in an email. “Each time the answer comes back that there is no meaningful pressure.” Each subsequent move, he wrote, “brings into sharper focus the prospect of mass displacement or mass ethnic cleansing.”
The permissiveness began under President Joe Biden, who offered unconditional support for Israel as it began its brutalization of Gaza and offered only modest public criticism and a one-off suspension of one shipment of munitions to Israel as it leveled the territory. It’s unclear how Biden would have reacted to these latest plans — if that “red line” that never emerged under his watch would have finally made an appearance.
The situation is ripe for a bigger, more permanent Israeli presence in Gaza than its pre-2005 settlements in the enclave. “The International arena is different in terms of a U.S. and Western zeitgeist, which is far more indulgent of aggressive and excessive Israeli actions,” Levy wrote in that email. “Israeli society is in some ways more divided, but in others, more unified in its willingness to support extreme and genocidal measures against Palestinians.”
“Things are far more fluid than in the past, with a far more zero-sum mindset guiding policy,” he added.
Munayyer and Levy noted that Trump’s own language has likely emboldened Israel to be blunter and more aggressive. Specifically, Trump’s idea to transform Gaza to create a Middle Eastern “Riviera” there, populated by “international people.” Trump’s erasure of Palestinians and fantasy of a new population dovetails with the right-wing segment of the Israeli government who want to annex Gaza. As Trump talks about taking control of the Panama Canal and Greenland and tries to undercut Ukraine’s position in peace negotiations with Russia, Israel may be wagering that it has a rare window of impunity for territorial control and possible annexation. Unfortunately, that calculation may be sound.
