Israel has seized 70 percent of Gaza and an Israeli official says the plan is to control 100 percent. Meanwhile the “Board of Peace” is planning to herd refugees into an area outside the destroyed cite of Rafah.
Israeli forces staging yellow-painted concrete blocks for demarcating the Yellow Line borders of the ceasefire agreement, October 2025. (Wikimedia Commons/CC0)
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter
As the U.S. renews attacks on Iran, it’s easy for the world to miss the fact that the U.S.-Israeli genocidal alliance has also dramatically reinvigorated its ethnic cleansing agendas in Gaza.
The Adelson-owned pro-Netanyahu outlet Israel Hayom reports that in the coming weeks the “Board of Peace” overseeing life in the Gaza Strip is planning to relocate Palestinians to “humanitarian shelters” that are not under Hamas control.
Israel Hayom reports that an area near the destroyed city of Rafah is the first location where such camps will be set up.
This is noteworthy because one year ago Defense Minister Israel Katz stated that there was a plan to construct a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, where “the emigration plan” for the Palestinians would then be implemented, adding that Benjamin Netanyahu was working on finding foreign nations to accept the population of Gaza.
It’s hard to ignore the similarities. Both accounts even state that the plan is to police the displaced Palestinians using an international force. The 2026 Israel Hayom report states that the camps will be overseen by “multinational forces under the Board of Peace’s management” and Israel Katz stated in 2025 that Israel is seeking international partners to manage the zone.
So to be clear, in July of last year Israeli officials were publicly stating that they were going to build a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah to house the Palestinians under international supervision while working to relocate them from their homeland to other countries, and in July of this year we learn that we will soon see Palestinians in Gaza relocated to “humanitarian shelters” near Rafah overseen by international forces.
So it sounds like the same plan. If it is, then it’s a plan for ethnic cleansing.
An aerial view showing destruction in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, after Israeli forces withdrawal and as the “ceasefire” took hold, Jan. 21, 2025. (UNRWA/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)
Israel has already expanded its control over Gaza from 53 percent to 70 percent of the Strip, concentrating the survivors of the genocide into a mere 30 percent of the Palestinian territory. And now, according to Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen, the plan is to expand control to 100 percent.
Israel National News quotes Cohen as saying during a recent radio interview that “our control of the territory will only continue to expand until we reach 100 percent,” adding, “two months ago we controlled 53 percentof the Strip, about a month ago around 60 percent and today we’re approaching 70 percent of the Strip’s area.”
This comes amid other reports we discussed recently which strongly indicate that the Trumpanyahu administration is renewing its push to remove all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
The other day we learned from the Israeli press that Israel’s national security agencies had been instructed to rebrand the ethnic cleansing plan as a “plan for free movement” in order to mitigate international resistance to the agenda.
A few days before that, we learned that Israel’s new national security chief had convened a meeting with officials from the IDF and Shin Bet to discuss the plan to displace the Palestinians of Gaza to other countries.
Again, Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza have always been about ethnic cleansing from the very beginning.
Within days of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October 2023, Israel’s Intelligence Ministry was circulating a plan for the entire population of Gaza to be moved to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, and an Israeli think tank had drawn up a strategy for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.”
The goal has always been to remove the Palestinians from Gaza so their territory can be taken from them. This was never anything other than a blatant Israeli land grab. They’ve been framing it as a “war” so that after they seize and colonize Gaza they can say “the Arabs fought a war and lost, they deserved to lose territory” as they always do, but it was never actually a war.
Calling the Gaza genocide a “war” is like seeing a man beating up a toddler and calling it a “fight.” It’s one of the world’s most sophisticated military forces raining explosives on an area packed full of children with the backing of the most powerful empire that has ever existed, opposed only by a few thousand guys running around in sandals with homemade rockets and ancient Kalashnikovs.
That’s not a war. It’s an ethnic cleansing operation. That’s all this has ever been.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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