US President Donald Trump received Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a formal dinner on Monday, during which both men reiterated their plans to forcibly remove the Palestinian population from Gaza in preparation for the enclave’s annexation.
When asked, “Is your Palestinian relocation plan still on the table?” Netanyahu praised Trump’s “brilliant vision” to expel the Palestinians from Gaza. “I think President Trump had a brilliant vision. It’s called free choice,” Netanyahu said.
He continued, “We’re working closely with the United States to find countries that will accept” the forcibly displaced Palestinians. Trump added, “And we’ve had great cooperation from surrounding countries. So something good will happen.”
By giving the Palestinians in Gaza a “free choice” to leave, Netanyahu means that he intends to starve and kill them by the thousands, so that those who remain alive will “choose” to leave.
When Trump first proposed his plan to “own” Gaza and expel the Palestinian people to other countries earlier this year, it was dismissed by the US media as a flight of fancy with no connection to actual US and Israeli plans.
In reality, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza has been a long-term aim of the Netanyahu government, which used the events of October 7, 2023 as a pretext to carry out this plan. Trump, in contrast to his predecessor Biden, openly stated the actual Israeli policy the US was supporting.
Now, six months after it was first proposed, the Israeli government is making far-reaching plans to carry out this ethnic cleansing policy, using its takeover of the provision of starvation rations as a means to lure the population of Gaza to the enclave’s south, where they will be herded into concentration camps and then expelled from the country.
The plan by Trump and Netanyahu to displace the people of Gaza is a flagrant violation of the prohibition of the forcible transfer of civilians during armed conflicts under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Their plan to steal the Palestinians’ land also violates the 1970 United Nations treaty, ratified by the United States, which stipulates that “The territory of a State shall not be the object of acquisition by another State resulting from the threat or use of force.”
As a result of the war crimes committed by Israel in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Gaza, Netanyahu faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.
When asked about the statement made five months ago by Democratic New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani that he would enforce the ICC’s arrest warrant against Netanyahu were he to be elected mayor, Trump and Netanyahu launched into a tirade against Mamdani, calling him a communist. Netanyahu dismissed the war crimes charges against him as “silly” and “not serious.”
The blood-curdling remarks by the two men turned into a farce when Netanyahu presented Trump with a letter he sent to the Nobel Prize Committee nominating Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, declaring, “He’s forging peace, as we speak, in one country, in one region after the other.”
After Netanyahu called for the American president to be given the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump could not resist boasting about dropping “the biggest bombs ever, the biggest bombs that we’ve ever dropped on anybody, when you think non-nuclear” on Iran just last month.
Despite the grotesque and farcical nature of the event, the homicidal plans the two men were discussing are very real and very serious.
On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced plans to construct what he called a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, which would hold the entire Palestinian population.
Katz stated that once inside, residents would not be allowed to leave by the Israeli military, which would patrol the camp.
He also said that the building of the camp would be coordinated with “the emigration plan, which will happen.”
Meanwhile, Reuters reported that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—a US- and Israeli-backed aid organization—has drawn up a proposal for establishing camps, which it calls “Humanitarian Transit Areas,” both inside and outside Gaza.
At least 600 Palestinians have been killed over the past five weeks at food distributions operated by the GHF, according to Gaza’s government media office.
These killings have taken place in over 20 separate massacres, which have become an almost daily occurrence as a critical component of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Last week, the Financial Times reported on a secret strategy document drawn up by the Boston Consulting Group, a major US corporate consulting firm, for “relocating” Palestinians from Gaza. The FT reported that the Boston Consulting Group estimated a “23k savings on every Palestinian relocating.” In a front-page article on Sunday, the Financial Times revealed that the plan was created with the involvement of staffers of former UK Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Condemning the US-Israeli ethnic cleansing plans, Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers, declared, “While the government still calls the deportation ‘voluntary,’ people in Gaza are under so many coercive measures that no departure from the strip can be seen in legal terms as consensual.”
He added, “When you drive someone out of their homeland, that would be a war crime in the context of a war. If it’s done on a massive scale like he plans, it becomes a crime against humanity.”
Last week, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an investigation featuring interviews with Israeli troops, who said they were repeatedly ordered to open fire on unarmed crowds of aid seekers.
To date, Israel has killed 57,000 people in Gaza, while the entire enclave is on the brink of starvation, with thousands of cases of acute malnutrition diagnosed last month alone.