Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has formally ordered the Israeli military to create plans for the building of a giant concentration camp on the ruins of Rafah, where the population of Gaza would be moved in preparation for their forcible expulsion, Haaretz reported Wednesday.
The Israeli newspaper reported that Netanyahu made the order at a meeting of Israel’s security cabinet on Saturday, before he left for Washington to meet with US President Donald Trump.
Wednesday’s report by Haaretz adds to the growing mountain of evidence that Israel is actively moving ahead with its ethnic cleansing plan, despite the presentation in the US media that Trump and Netanyahu are seeking “peace” and a “ceasefire.”
Two days after Netanyahu ordered the military to start planning the concentration camp, Defense Minister Israel Katz announced preparations for what he called a “humanitarian city.” Katz stated that the Israeli military would patrol the camp, and that once inside, residents would not be allowed to leave. He also said that the building of the camp would be coordinated with “the emigration plan, which will happen.”
On the same day as the meeting with Trump, Netanyahu said the “relocation plan” was on Israel’s agenda, calling it a “brilliant vision.”
Only last week, Haaretz reported the existence of an internal briefing by the Israeli military that the “concentration and movement of the population” is an official goal of Israel.
In May, Netanyahu named the implementation of the “Trump plan” for ethnic cleansing as one of its official aims of the war.
International human rights organizations have condemned the ethnic cleansing plan. In a statement Wednesday, the Euromed Monitor called it “a deliberate effort to depopulate Gaza and impose a new demographic reality that advances a colonial project to erase the Palestinian presence.”
The camp would be “built on the ruins of a destroyed city lacking even the most basic necessities of life,” the Euro-Med monitor reported. “The zone will be placed under strict security control, with severe restrictions on movement, including a ban on exiting. This effectively constitutes the establishment of a closed mass concentration camp, where the population will be forcibly held outside any legitimate legal framework.”
It added that the move is “an organized act of genocide, involving the deliberate imposition of life-threatening conditions aimed at the gradual destruction of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip through starvation, humiliation, mass detention, and forced subjugation.”
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. In a front-page article on Sunday, the newspaper revealed that the plan was created with the involvement of staffers of former UK Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Meanwhile, Reuters reported that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—the US- and Israeli-backed organization that delivers a trickle of aid—has drawn up a proposal for establishing camps, which it calls “Humanitarian Transit Areas,” both inside and outside Gaza.
The involvement in the US-Israeli ethnic cleansing plan by the Boston Consulting Group, one of the largest corporate consultants in the world, has created a political crisis at one of the pillars of the global corporate establishment.
On Thursday, the Boston Consulting Group announced that two of its senior partners were resigning over their role in the project.
Boston Consulting Group’s chief risk officer, Adam Farber, and the head of its social-impact practice, Rich Hutchinson, will be stepping down from their roles but will not be fired by the company.
The firm is clearly attempting to limit the damage to its reputation by claiming its involvement in the scheme was the product of individual bad apples. “An independent investigation confirmed this was the result of individual misconduct coupled with failures in oversight and judgment,” the firm told the Wall Street Journal.
“Even if this was not in any way, shape, or form a formal BCG project, our association with it is real—deeply troubling, and reputationally very damaging,” Boston Consulting Group CEO Christoph Schweizer wrote in a letter obtained by the Journal.
In reality, the firm was clearly complicit in the planning of war crimes and crimes against humanity, putting its executives in legal jeopardy of prosecution.
Meanwhile, Israel is continuing its daily massacres and mass starvation policies in Gaza. On Thursday, an Israeli strike on a clinic in central Gaza killed 10 children and six adults.
The clinic, which was run by the humanitarian organization Project HOPE, screens children for malnutrition and provides them with nutritional supplements.
“Project HOPE’s health clinics are a place of refuge in Gaza where people bring their small children, women access pregnancy and postpartum care, people receive treatment for malnutrition, and more. Yet, this morning, innocent families were mercilessly attacked as they stood in line waiting for the doors to open,” Project HOPE said in a statement.
Malnutrition is surging in Gaza, with over 5,000 children between six months and five years old diagnosed with acute malnutrition in May, according to UNICEF.
Gaza’s hospitals are on the verge of running out of fuel, with Reuters reporting Thursday that doctors are attempting to preserve scarce energy supplies by cramming multiple premature babies into single incubators.
“Premature babies are now in a very critical condition,” Dr. Muneer Alboursh, director general of the Gaza Ministry of Health, told Reuters, saying that Israel’s blockade is “depriving these vulnerable people of their basic right to medical care, turning the hospital into a silent graveyard.”