Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that Israel’s intention with its ongoing genocidal assault on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip is to militarily control the entire territory.
On Friday, Netanyahu’s security cabinet, against the recommendations of the Israeli military, which has already placed 86% of Gaza under a “militarized zone” or displacement orders, approved a plan to complete the takeover of northern Gaza by controlling Gaza City and forcibly evacuate tens of thousands of Palestinians remaining there.
Source: UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, August 6, 2025
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff objected to the plan on the grounds it would endanger the lives of Israeli hostages and exhaust the military.
In an interview with Fox News, when asked whether Israel would take control of all of Gaza, Netanyahu answered, “We intend to.”
He went on to say that Israel did not aim to permanently control Gaza but instead to overthrow Hamas, which has been the governing authority there since 2006, and to replace it with some other government.
From the start, Netanyahu has opposed the idea of the Palestinian Authority (PA) governing the Gaza Strip.
For years prior to the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, Netanyahu maintained a policy of utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to prevent any movement toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
After a Hamas-led government was democratically elected in 2006, Israel responded by imposing a siege to collectively punish the civilian population and colluded with the U.S. government and Fatah, the party of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, to overthrow the legitimate leadership.
That effort resulted in violent clashes leading ultimately to Fatah being expelled from Gaza and a divided Palestinian leadership, with Hamas continuing to rule there while the PA continues to rule in the West Bank under Abbas despite his legal term having ended in 2009.
The PA was established under the Oslo Accords to essentially serve as Israel’s collaborator in enforcing its occupation regime, which is one of the key reasons why Hamas fared so well politically in municipal and legislative elections.
Israel has been the occupying power in Gaza since June 1967, when it launched what Israelis call the “Six Day War” with a surprise attack on Egypt. During that war, Israel invaded and occupied the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jersualem.
A common refrain among apologists of Israel’s occupation regime is that it withdrew from Gaza in 2005. However, while it’s true that Israel withdrew military forces and dismantled illegally constructed Jewish settlements, Israel has remained the occupying power in Gaza by virtue of its control over its borders, territorial waters, and airspace, in addition to continued administrative management.
The unit within the Israeli Ministry of Defense responsible for implementing the Israeli government’s civilian policies within the Occupied Palestinian Territories is known as the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT.
While Netanyahu denied any intention to establish a permanent military presence in Gaza, effective annexation is precisely what members of his governing coalition have been aiming at from the start.
After the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, dubbed “Operation Al Aqsa Flood,” Israel responded by placing Gaza under a total siege, cutting off electricity and water and blocking entry of food, fuel, and other goods essential for survival.
The siege was accompanied by a military invasion, and in mid-October, the IDF ordered the 1.1 million Palestinians inhabiting northern Gaza to flee south or be deemed “terrorists.”
On October 14, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, warned the international community that there was a grave danger that Israel would perpetrate a mass ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
In a position paper published on October 17, 2023, the Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy, which has close ties to the Israeli military and security establishment, revealed the intention to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians.
The paper lauded Israel’s military assault on Gaza as “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip.”
Then on October 24, the Israeli news outlet Calcalist reported on a document from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry stating that the operation in Gaza could “yield positive and long-term strategic results”—namely, the expulsion of Palestinians to the Sinai desert in Egypt.
The full document in Hebrew was published by the Israeli magazine Mekomit, and an English translation was published by +972 Magazine, an independent outlet run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists.
As reported by Mekomit, the argument was made that it would be in the Palestinians’ own best interest to accept expulsion “compared to the number of casualties expected if the population remains.”
Either ethnic cleansing or genocide—that was the choice the Palestinians would effectively be offered.
The document stated that “the most dangerous alternative” to ethnic cleansing would be for the PA to take over Gaza because it could “lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
Another option was to establish a “local Arab authority” other than the PA, but this idea, too, suffered from “significant deficiencies.”
The overall aim was to “motivate” Palestinians to flee Gaza—which would solve the problem of having to find a way to rule over them without any involvement from the existing Palestinian leadership.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office responded to the document’s publication by saying that no plan for governing Gaza after “eliminating Hamas’ governmental and military capabilities” had yet been officially discussed much less decided upon.
On November 10, 2023, when asked whether he supported Israeli resettlement in Gaza, Netanyahu expressed his view that this wasn’t “a realistic goal,” but that he aimed for “full security control.”
The following day, Israeli security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter told the media, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”
“Nakba” means “Catastrophe” in Arabic and is used by Palestinians to refer to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, which is means by which the demographically “Jewish state” of Israel came into existence.
On November 19, The Jerusalem Post published an article by Israeli Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel advocating the “voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons, outside the Strip.”
Illustrating how the “voluntary” expulsion would be “motivated,” after forcing residents of northern Gaza to flee south, Israel proceeded to escalate its indiscriminate bombardment of southern Gaza.
Referring to Gaza’s second largest city, in the southern part of the strip, former Israeli Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked said that Israel would “turn Khan Younis into a soccer field” and then “take advantage of the destruction” to get other countries to accept “all 2 million” Palestinians who would be forcibly expelled. “That’s the solution for Gaza.”
On November 30, the Israeli magazine Israel Hayom reported that Netanyahu’s “strategic goal” was “thinning the population of Gaza to the minimum possible.”
This “voluntary emigration” was “the right solution,” in the mind of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
In January 2024, as reported by The Times of Israel, Netanyahu declared that “Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population.” At the same time, “a senior Likud member insisted” that the prime minister “had previously expressed support for the idea” but was facing pressure from the U.S. government not to express such thoughts publicly.
Danny Danon, a member of the Knesset (Israel’s legislature), and currently Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, told the Israeli news outlet, “The prime minister told me two weeks ago in this room that it’s a good idea.”
The problem, Netanyahu had told Danon, was finding countries “willing to absorb Gazans.”
Thus, there was no real debate among Israeli leaders about whether Gaza should be ethnically cleansed—only about whether it was politically feasible to achieve that goal, with Netanyahu merely holding a more pragmatic position than the even more radical extremists in his government.
A few weeks later, on January 28, Netanyahu attended an event titled “Conference for the Victory of Israel—Settlement Brings Security: Returning to the Gaza Strip and Northern Samaria,” where thousands gathered to call for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and Jewish resettlement of Gaza, including Knesset members, ministers from Netanyahu’s coalition government, rabbis, and settlement activists.
Regarding the “voluntary” emigration of Palestinians from Gaza, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi explained that “‘voluntary’ is at times a state you impose until they give their consent.”
A similar event titled “Preparing to Resettle Gaza” was held in October 2024. There, politicians and leaders of the settlement movement “proclaimed their shared vision” of “re-establishing a Jewish presence” in “every sliver” of the Gaza Strip, as reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Daniella Weiss, the head of the extremist settler organization that held the event, told the crowd, “You will witness how Jews go to Gaza and Arabs disappear from Gaza.”
Ethnically cleansing and resettling Gaza was not enough, however. “The real borders of greater Israel”, Weiss added, “are between the Euphrates and the Nile.”
The speaker given the warmest welcome, according to Haaretz, was National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who reiterated the plan by saying, “We will encourage the voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens. We will offer them the opportunity to move to other countries because that land belongs to us.”
With Israeli leaders openly calling for the expulsion of Palestinians and Jewish resettlement of Gaza, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem called on the international community to “stop the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza,” stating:
The magnitude of the crimes Israel is currently committing in the northern Gaza Strip in its campaign to empty it of however many residents are left is impossible to describe, not just because hundreds of thousands of people enduring starvation, disease without access to medical care and incessant bombardments and gunfire defies comprehension, but because Israel has cut them off from the world.
…For a year now, since the war began, the international community has shown utter impotence to stop the indiscriminate attack on civilians in the Gaza Strip. Now, when it is clearer than ever that Israel intends to forcibly displace northern Gaza’s residents by committing some of the gravest crimes under the laws of war, the world’s nations must take action.
But the world’s governments remained impotent—or, like the United States, complicit—and the “voluntary” transfer of Palestinians out of northern Gaza proceeded apace.
The director-general of the ministry of health in Gaza, Dr. Munir Al-Borsh, reported that the IDF was bombing the generators at the Indonesian Hospital, “cutting off electricity, causing patients to die after being disconnected from oxygen devices.”
“The smell of death is everywhere as bodies are left lying on the roads or under the rubble,” said the Commission-General of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main humanitarian aid agency operating in Gaza. “Missions to clear the bodies or provide humanitarian assistance are denied. In northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die.”
Haaretz published an editorial stating that “the scale of the civilian casualties from the army’s daily bombings of towns and refugee camps in northern Gaza—children, women, elderly people and men who are innocent of any crime—is enormous.”
The medical system had largely collapsed, hundreds of thousands were at risk of starvation, and residents were ordered to flee south, raising “grave suspicions” that “Israel is effectively perpetrating ethnic cleansing” to “permanently empty this area of Palestinians.”
The permanent expulsion of Gaza’s residents accorded with what was called the “Generals’ Plan,” which was conceived by Major General (reserve) Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council who in 2004 described Gaza as “a huge concentration camp,” and who had publicly argued from the start that it was necessary to “create a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza” and “to make Gaza a place that is temporarily, or permanently, impossible to live in.”
“Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” Eiland reiterated in an article in the Israeli online news outlet Ynet on October 12, 2023, so that the “entire population of Gaza will either move to Egypt or move to the Gulf.”
Every moving vehicle would be targeted, he wrote, “and it does not matter whether it is transporting water or other critical supplies.”
Comparing it to the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan, he said “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist”—a means to the end of finishing the job of ethnic cleansing that began in 1948 with the Nakba, which resulted in about two-thirds of Gaza’s population today being comprised of refugees.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant denied that the Generals’ Plan was officially being implemented, Haaretz noted, yet “the Jewish supremacist parties in the governing coalition” were “openly pursuing a policy of mass expulsions and the renewal of Jewish settlement in northern Gaza.”
As the editorial’s headline stated, “If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is.”
The next day, UN Secretary General António Guterres urged the international community to act to prevent what he called “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza.
On November 10, 2024, Haaretz ran another editorial titled “Netanyahu’s Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza Is on Display for All to See,” which quoted senior IDF officer Brigadier General Itzik Cohen telling reporters, “There is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes.” He added, “We received very clear orders. My task is to create a cleansed space.”
When asked if the IDF was carrying out the Generals’ Plan, Cohen denied any knowledge of it, but as the Haaretz editors astutely observed, “Instead of talking about the Generals’ Plan, we should be talking about ‘Netanyahu’s Orders.’”
Later that month, at a meeting of the Yesha Council, an organization representing municipal councils of Israeli settlements in the illegally occupied West Bank, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said it was “possible and necessary to conquer Gaza” and “to take civil responsibility there.”
He anticipated that with the incoming Trump administration, it might be possible to achieve the goal of “voluntary emigration.”
“It is possible to create a situation,” Smotrich said, “in which Gaza in two years will be less than half of its current population.”
On December 2, The New York Times reported that Israel had been systematically demolishing buildings to create a “buffer zone” bisecting Gaza while fortifying its military bases there, indicating that the IDF “may be preparing to exert long-term control over the area.”
After taking office in January 2024, President Donald Trump described Gaza as “literally a demolition site” and endorsed the plan to ethnically cleanse the entire strip, telling reporters, “You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.”
In early February, Trump said the United States would “take over the Gaza Strip” and “level it out” to “create an economic development.”
Trump’s words pleased National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who posted to X, “Donald, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called Trump’s plan an “excellent idea” that would make way for Jewish settlers.
On February 4, standing beside Netanyahu during a joint press conference at the White House, Trump reiterated his plan to “take over the Gaza Strip” and “level it out” to create “the Riviera of the Middle East”—without the Palestinians, who would have to be relocated “to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts”.
Later asked to clarify how many Palestinians he was proposing to permanently relocate, Trump replied, “All of them.”
In mid-February, Smotrich said that Israel was coordinating with the Trump administration to execute the plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza within a few weeks, describing it as “a huge logistical operation to take such a large number of people out of here.”
On February 25, Trump posted an AI-generated video to his Truth Social network portraying “Trump Gaza,” replete with images of a luxury beach resort and a scene of Trump and Netanyahu lounging together on beach chairs in swimsuits drinking cocktails.
A compilation of screenshots from the AI-generated video “Trump Gaza”
On January 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration, a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas had gone into effect, the first phase of which called for Hamas to release Israeli hostages while Israel opened the crossings to facilitate the entry of six hundred trucks per day of desperately needed humanitarian aid.
Hamas upheld its end of the agreement, including by releasing 33 hostages, but Israel failed to fulfill its obligations with aid deliveries and continued to carry out frequent attacks in Gaza.
Then on February 10, Trump gave Netanyahu an explicit green light to violate the ceasefire and resume its genocidal assault on Gaza’s civilian population.
Instead of proceeding through the next phase of the ceasefire agreement, which would have secured the release of remaining hostages while requiring Israel to cease hostilities and withdraw its forces, Trump advised Israel to effectively renege on its own obligations by issuing Hamas an ultimatum to release all hostages and if Hamas refused, to “cancel it” and “let hell break out.”
On March 2, Israel reimposed a total siege of Gaza, blocking entry of all humanitarian aid, while preparing a “hell plan” to pressure Hamas into accepting its ultimatum—with Netanyahu calling it the “Witkoff proposal,” referring to Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff.
Three days later, Trump stated on Twitter/X that he was already “sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job.”
Making clear that “the job” was either ethnic cleansing or genocide, he explicitly threatening the entire civilian population with death if Hamas did not accede to Israel’s ultimatum.
With Trump’s full approval and encouragement, Israel resumed its genocidal assault during the predawn hours of March 18 with a massive bombardment that killed over four hundred Palestinians before midday, including 263 women and children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
Among the dead were 130 children killed by Israeli airstrikes on shelters, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Revealing how maniacal and genocidal Israeli society has become, a public opinion survey reported by Haaretz on May 22 revealed that 47% of Israelis supported the idea of the IDF killing all inhabitants of Gaza’s cities; 82% supported the idea of ethnically cleansing Gaza; and 56% supported the idea of likewise ridding Israel of its Arab citizens by forcibly deporting them.
The thin veil has lifted and the true face of modern political Zionism is revealed.
Netanyahu’s plan to complete the military takeover and ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza is just another step toward the ultimate goal, backed by the U.S. government, of ridding the strip of all its inhabitants, one way or another.
If the Palestinians cannot be “motivated” to leave through the indiscriminate killing and systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure aimed at rendering Gaza uninhabitable, their alternative is to stay and die while the world looks on.
Notwithstanding meaningless rhetoric feigning concern for the plight of Palestinian civilians, Israel’s genocide was fully supported by the Biden administration. When Trump came into office, there was a ceasefire agreement in effect between Israel and Hamas, which he then encouraged Israel to violate in order to resume its extermination campaign.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is currently presiding over a case brought by South Africa against Israel for violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The U.S. government, too, has been violating the convention, which also prohibits states from acting complicitly and, indeed, obligates governments to prevent acts of genocide—a duty that South Africa aimed to fulfill by filing its application to the ICJ in December 2023.
On November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including directing attacks against civilians and using starvation as a method of war.
Despite these actions at the ICJ and ICC, Israel’s genocide continues unabated, straining the credibility of the existing “rules-based international order.”
The whole world is watching now as the ostensible raison d’être of the UN, the ICJ, and the ICC is being put to the test. Will these governmental institutions live up to their promise or prove their own obsolescence?
In the face of the ineptitude and impotence of the world’s governments, it is primarily up to the American people to effect the paradigm shift required to render it politically infeasible for the U.S. government to continue its longstanding policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
Only then will there be a realistic hope of seeing an end to Israel’s criminal violence.
