WHILE US president Donald Trump was meeting with Israeli leader Benjamín Netanyahu on Monday, ostensibly to discuss a ‘peace plan’ for Gaza, the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, laid out the real plan to drive the entire population of Gaza into a prison camp.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Katz laid out plans to force all Palestinians in Gaza into what he called a ‘humanitarian city’ and announced that he had instructed the Zionist military to prepare to establish this camp on the ruins of the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
Katz said that Palestinians would go through ‘security screening’ before being forced into the camp and once inside would not be allowed to leave. The perimeter of this ‘humanitarian camp’ would be under the control of Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).
Initially, 600,000 Palestinians would be ‘moved’ into an open air prison camp, and eventually the entire population of Gaza, around 2.1 million, would be forced into this humanitarian camp, with the Zionist regime aiming to implement, in Katz’s words, ‘the emigration plan, which will happen.’
Leading Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard said that Katz’s plan ‘laid out an operational plan for a crime against humanity. It is nothing less than that. It is all about population transfer to the southern tip of the Gaza Strip in preparation for deportation outside the Strip.’
He added: ‘When you drive someone out of their homeland that would be a war crime, in the context of war. If it’s done on a massive scale like he plans, it becomes a crime against humanity.’
When Trump first floated his vision of turning Gaza into the ‘Riviera of the Mediterranean’ back in February, it was dismissed by many as a typical fantasy from the US president who said that Palestinians should leave Gaza to ‘clean out’ the Strip.
But now it is clear that, far from fantasy, the intention to drive every last Palestinian from Gaza through genocidal slaughter, deliberate starvation and disease has been a long term plan by both US imperialism and its Zionist partner in crime.
According to Katz, any ceasefire that Trump and Netanyahu agreed upon in their meeting on Monday would provide the opportunity for work on the ‘humanitarian city’ to begin.
Following that meeting, at which Netanyahu sucked up to Trump by revealing he will be nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize, both Trump and Netanyahu claimed that progress was being made to find other countries willing to accept Palestinians forced from their homeland.
Katz’s plan for one big prison camp for 2.1 million Palestinians is not the only one that is apparently under consideration by the US and Israel.
According to the Reuters news agency, a $2 billion plan was submitted to the White House for ‘humanitarian Transit Areas’ in Gaza to ‘deradicalise’ Palestinians and prepare them for relocation in order to facilitate Trump’s ‘vision for Gaza.’
These camps are described as ‘voluntary’ in the plan.
According to Reuters, this plan was submitted by the US-Israeli-backed so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the private company that runs the food distribution centres in Gaza, notorious as a killing field for starving Palestinians.
Over 600 Palestinians have been killed and 4,000 wounded by IOF troops firing on people seeking food at these distribution sites.
The GHF has denied any knowledge or involvement in any plan for transit areas.
The entire plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, ignores the fact that the Palestinian people have demonstrated time and again their determination to resist and fight illegal occupation, despite nearly 60,000 officially recorded as being killed by the imperialist-backed Zionist regime.
Now is the time for workers and youth in the US, UK and Europe to take action to put an end to the crimes against humanity, by forcing their trade unions to call general strikes to bring down these regimes that arm and support Zionist genocide and ethnic cleansing, and replace them with workers governments and socialism.
Dumping imperialism in the dustbin of history with the victory of the World Socialist Revolution is the way forward today.
