Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Monday that Israel’s cabinet had adopted a plan to permanently occupy the Gaza Strip, internally displace its population into concentration camps and enforce a military monopoly on the distribution of food.
Echoing the “final solution,” the Nazi term for the genocide of Europe’s Jews, Netanyahu declared, “It’s time to launch the concluding moves.”
Netanyahu said that the Palestinian population “will be moved,” and that Israeli forces will not withdraw from territories they occupy. Israeli military spokesman Effie Defrin said the plan would involve “moving most of Gaza’s population” to “clean” areas.
It involves the suspension of international humanitarian operations in Gaza, to be replaced by “hubs” controlled by Israel and manned by private US military contractors. US President Donald Trump, in genocidal double-speak worthy of his idol Adolf Hitler, said Monday, “People are starving, and we’re going to help them get some food.”
The full military occupation of Gaza is the prerequisite for the plan announced in February by President Donald Trump, and publicly embraced by Netanyahu, to expel the Palestinian people, plow over the existing buildings and annex the territory.
Confirming this fact, a “senior security official” told the Guardian that the “transfer program for Gaza residents … will be part of the operation’s goals.”
Once the population of Gaza is herded into concentration camps under armed guard by Israeli soldiers and US “contractors,” the next step will be to begin loading them onto ships for transportation abroad, or on death marches through the desert.
On March 23, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced the creation of a bureau of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) dedicated to the relocation of the Palestinians from Gaza, which would oversee their “departure to third countries, including securing their movement, establishing movement routes, checking pedestrians at designated crossings in the Gaza Strip, as well as coordinating the provision of infrastructure that will enable passage by land, sea and air to the destination countries.”
US media coverage of this ethnic cleansing program has consisted of US-Israeli disinformation, claiming that the operation is targeting “Hamas” or aimed at securing the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. There is a deliberate effort to hide the fact that the military occupation of Gaza marks the actualization of Trump’s genocidal plan, and that it will be a death sentence for the hostages who remain in Gaza, who will simply be starved to death if they are not killed by Israeli bombs.
Within the Israeli government, however, there is no effort to obscure the aims of the military occupation plan.
“We are finally going to occupy the Gaza Strip. We will stop being afraid of the word ‘occupation,’” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told Israel’s Channel 12.
He added that there will be “No retreat from the territories we have conquered, not even in exchange for hostages,” effectively precluding any arrangement that would ensure the survival of the remaining hostages.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called for the total blocking of all food aid into Gaza. He added, “No electricity, and no other aid should be allowed—neither by the [Israeli military] nor by civil society.”
It has been over 60 days since Israel, in breach of an earlier ceasefire agreement, suspended the entry of all food, water, electricity and medical supplies into Gaza.
Next week, Trump is due to visit the Middle East to personally oversee the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the US-Israeli plan to create a “new Middle East” under direct imperialist domination.
A statement by humanitarian aid groups operating in Gaza, including the United Nations, said the plan “appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic—as part of a military strategy.”
Bushra Khalidi, West Bank policy lead for the Oxfam charity, said:
Moving aid into fenced, supervised spaces under military or private contractor control recalls some of the darkest chapters of human failure. ... That’s not protection, that’s coercion. We would never support any model that would be treating civilians basically as prisoners.
In a statement, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) condemned the plan to occupy Gaza and take over the distribution of food, declaring:
The level of need among civilians in Gaza right now is overwhelming and aid needs to be let in immediately. ... Under international humanitarian law, Israel has an obligation to use all means available to ensure that the basic needs of the civilian population under its control are met.
Amjad Shawa, the Gaza-based director of the Palestinian NGOs Network, told Al Jazeera that most people in Gaza “are starving,” with food prices soaring to unattainable levels. “A bag of flour, 25 kilos [55lb], it’s $350 in the black market now.” A bag of flour this size would have cost $5 before the start of the genocide.
Tom Fletcher, lead United Nations humanitarian officer, said:
To the Israeli authorities, and those who can still reason with them, we say again: Lift this brutal blockade. ... To the civilians left unprotected, no apology can suffice. But I am truly sorry that we are unable to move the international community to prevent this injustice.
According to the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, 91 percent of the population of Gaza is food insecure, with most of the population facing “emergency” or “catastrophic” levels of hunger.
Since Israel’s new bombardment after the cease-fire collapsed, it has declared more and more evacuation and no-go zones, forcing some 420,000 Gazans to flee yet again and blocking access to around 70 percent of the enclave, according to UN estimates.
To date, over 52,000 Palestinians have been directly killed in the US-Israeli genocide, the vast majority of whom are women, children and elderly people.