Last Friday, the American national broadcaster NBC News reported that White House sources had told it that the Donald Trump administration is actively considering a plan to permanently ‘relocate’ as many as one million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya.
According to the NBC report: ‘The plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libya’s leadership, two people with direct knowledge of the plans and a former US official said.’
Three of these sources told NBC that in return for the Libyans’ agreement to this ‘relocation’ of half of the population of Gaza, the US is offering to unfreeze the estimated $30 billion of Libyan money still held by the US since the imperialist-backed overthrow of Colonel Gadaffi in 2006.
Since the overthrow and brutal murder of Gadaffi, Libya has been torn apart by warring factions fighting over control of the country’s oil wealth.
The US State Department advises Americans not to travel to Libya due to threats of ‘crime, terrorism, unexploded landmines, civil unrest, kidnapping and armed conflict’.
This apparently hasn’t stopped Trump from viewing it as an ideal place to dump a million Palestinians or migrant US workers.
This month, Trump authorised sending Asian nationals from the US to detention centres in Libya – detention centres that human rights groups have condemned as ‘horrific’ and ‘deplorable’.
These flights have been blocked so far following the intervention of US courts, but Libya is clearly a country that would fulfil Trump’s desire to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians.
Previous plans to force them into neighbouring countries have come unstuck, with the refusal of the governments and monarchs in the region to agree to US proposals to have Palestinians dumped on them.
These rulers are only too aware that this would spark an uprising by their own people, a revolutionary uprising that would overthrow them.
The immediate reaction from the Trump administration was to deny any such plan was being considered while the Israeli regime denied any knowledge of it.
Nevertheless, such a plan clearly fits in with Trump’s demented vision for Gaza as the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ under the control of America.
Last Thursday, towards the end of his visit to Middle East countries, Trump told reporters that the US should ‘take’ possession of Gaza and turn it into a ‘freedom zone’, adding that ‘Hamas is going to have to be dealt with.’
While reports of Trump’s latest plan to seize Gaza were appearing in the press, the Zionist regime was mounting a full-on military invasion of Gaza accompanied by a massive increase in bombings targeting the remaining hospitals in the Strip along with refugee centres.
Yesterday, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that this expanded military operation and large-scale ground invasion meant Zionist forces would ‘take control of all’ of Gaza.
Earlier, Netanyahu pledged that the entire population of Gaza would be ‘displaced’ by a genocidal campaign that has killed over 53,000 Palestinians already since October 2023.
Like Trump’s vainglorious boasts of turning Gaza into a playground for the rich, Netanyahu’s promise to the ultra-right Zionists that Israel could take over military control of the Strip indefinitely has come up against the brick wall of the determination of the Palestinian people not to be driven off their land.
All the genocide, starvation and torture inflicted by the Zionist regime has failed to crush the Palestinian resistance to occupation – a heroic resistance that has won the support of tens of millions of workers and youth across the US, UK, Europe and the whole world.
On Saturday, over half a million workers and youth demonstrated in London calling for victory to Palestine and an end to the complicity of the Starmer government with Zionist genocide.
This powerful mass movement must now demand that the leaders of the trade unions take action by organising a general strike to bring down this rotten Labour government and replace it with a workers’ government that will immediately break with the Israeli regime, recognise the independent state of Palestine and provide all the weapons and material aid required for its victory over the genocidal Israeli state.
