Israel’s return to war is a prelude to mass expulsion

In the 15 months that followed 7 October 2023, countless people around the world demonstrated for a ceasefire in Gaza. A small hope emerged when one was agreed in January, even while a return to the status-quo was clearly insufficient. At least Gazans would stop being crushed under buildings, the logic went. At least they would be able to mourn their 45,000 dead.

That hope, bleak in its humility, was killed on Tuesday. Israeli rocket-fire announced the end of the agreement. The strikes hit during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and followed the imposition of a new blockade of the humanitarian aid on which Gazans depend. Benjamin Netanyahu has since said that fighting is back "in full force": ground troops are again moving into the corridor between north and south Gaza, dividing it into two and isolating those who returned to the former when the ceasefire began. At time of writing, the Associated Press has reported 600 new deaths.

The new assault appears to lack the Israeli public's backing. Big anti-government protests have taken place since Tuesday, with demonstrators accusing ministers of abandoning the remaining hostages. Many are also angry about the sacking of Shin Bet director Ronen Bar in the middle of the agency's investigation into corruption and media leaks among Netanyahu's aides. To Aluf Benn, editor-in-chief of Haaretz, the two developments are of a piece, representative of a taste for autocracy applicable on both sides of the green line.

Still, the experiences on either side of that line remain incomparable. In this week's Pickle, first published on Tuesday in +972, Vashti editor Ben Reiff examines the war's resumption in the context of a new US attitude and argues that at its heart is something more enduring: the Israeli government's appetite for Palestinian land without the Palestinians.

Two months after agreeing to a ceasefire deal that should have ended the war, Israel has resumed its bombardment of the Gaza Strip with an intensity that recalls the earliest days of the onslaught. Israeli airstrikes have killed over 400 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more since the early hours of this morning, and the army has ordered thousands of residents of the towns and neighbourhoods spanning the perimeter of the Strip to flee their homes. 

Israel has again fully sealed off Rafah Crossing to medical evacuees, while Egyptian and American forces that had replaced Israeli troops in the Netzarim Corridor as part of the ceasefire are withdrawing from their posts. Dismembered bodies are piling up in hospitals once more, with medical staff across the Strip warning that their facilities are at full capacity. 

We know what comes next: more airstrikes and evacuation orders and likely another ground invasion which, if we are to take Israeli ministers at their word, promises to be more extensive and lethal than the last. “Israel will, from now on, act against Hamas with increasing military strength,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement earlier today. “With God’s help,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich echoed, “[the renewed assault] will look completely different from what has been done so far.” Former National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who quit the government over the ceasefire deal, appears set to triumphantly return to office.

But to what end? Israel is spinning a narrative that it had no choice but to resume the offensive due to “Hamas’ repeated refusal to release our hostages, as well as its rejection of all the proposals it has received from U.S. Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff and from the mediators.” Yet this is a total distortion of reality, and the families of Israeli hostages who remain captive in Gaza know it.

“The claim that the war is being renewed for the release of the hostages is a complete deception,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement. “The Israeli government has chosen to give up on the hostages [through] the deliberate dismantling of the process to return our loved ones.”

Indeed, what Hamas rejected were Israel’s attempts to renege on the terms of the ceasefire that both parties had committed to. The second phase of the deal, which was supposed to bring about the return of the remaining hostages and a permanent ceasefire, was due to begin over two weeks ago, except Israel never allowed it to. Instead, together with Witkoff, Israel ripped up the agreement and concocted a new proposal: to extend phase one and keep exchanging hostages for Palestinian detainees; in other words, to sever the release of hostages from any guarantee to end the war. 

Israel knew Hamas would reject this proposal, and that was the point all along. The manoeuvre simply gave the Israeli government a pretext to re-impose a total blockade on food, water, fuel, electricity, and medicine into the Strip; and now, with President Trump’s full backing, to resume its genocidal assault. This time, though, the end goal is clearer than ever.

'Finishing the job'

When Trump stood beside Netanyahu in the White House on 4 February and proclaimed his intention to “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip, he didn’t go into detail about what exactly this would portend for the enclave’s 2.3 million Palestinian residents, besides making it clear that Gaza will no longer be their home. “We’ll make sure something really spectacular is done,” he declared, adding that the population could be relocated to “other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts” where they will be able to “live out their lives in peace and harmony.”

In essence, what Trump presented wasn’t really a blueprint; it was a green light for Israel’s government and defence establishment to begin imagining scenarios for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. 

Where the population would go didn’t really matter (Egypt and Jordan swiftly rejected Trump’s suggestion that they would take in displaced Palestinians). What mattered was that the most powerful country in the world had given its backing to what the Israeli right has long referred to as “finishing the job” that the Nakba of 1948 left incomplete; what senior ministers and government agencies have been clamouring for since October 7; and what Netanyahu himself has reportedly considered to be a desirable outcome.

The Israeli government didn’t waste any time in getting the wheels turning. As Environmental Protection Minister Idit Sliman put it: “God has sent us the [Trump] administration, and it is clearly telling us: it’s time to inherit the land.”

As soon as Netanyahu returned from Washington, Israel’s security cabinet resoundingly endorsed Trump’s proposal. Defence Minister Israel Katz set up a new authority to facilitate what is euphemistically referred to as the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza, and discussed plans to that effect with senior figures in the army and the Prime Minister’s Office. COGAT, the army unit responsible for handling Palestinian civilian affairs, prepared its own outline, stating that the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza can proceed even if Egypt refuses to open its border: the army will instead facilitate their transport via land or sea to an airport, and from there to destination countries.

Lauding Katz’s creation of a “very large emigration department” in the Defence Ministry, Smotrich told a meeting in the Knesset earlier this month that “if we remove 5,000 [Palestinians] a day, it will take a year [to expel them all],” adding that budget will not be an issue. And while he conceded that the logistics of finding countries to receive them will be complex, he noted that Israel was working with the United States to identify candidates.

Indeed, in recent days, American and Israeli officials told AP that their governments had approached Sudan, Somalia, and Somaliland about absorbing Palestinians from Gaza in exchange for financial, diplomatic, and security benefits. CBS later reported that the Trump administration has also reached out to the new interim government in Syria via a third-party interlocutor.

It is unclear if any of these regimes would actually entertain such a proposition. But if we learned anything from the Abraham Accords, it’s that, for the right price, there will be takers.

Making Gaza unlivable

There will, of course, be no “voluntary emigration” from Gaza; Palestinians have unequivocally rejected Trump’s plan, hitting back that the only places they will willingly relocate to are the villages, towns, and cities inside Israel from which they were expelled in 1948. Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Katz know this even better than Trump does — which is why, in practice, the idea of eradicating Gaza’s population was always premised on a resumption of Israel’s military assault on the territory.

Forcibly displacing over 2 million people, even with the support of a global superpower, is no simple task. For one thing, it would require eliminating Hamas as a viable resistance force, which Israel was unable to do throughout more than 15 months of fighting. Trump was never going to agree to putting American boots on the ground to fulfil his fantasy; it was always going to be left in Israeli hands to work out the practicalities. And while we don’t yet know how exactly the army will escalate its renewed offensive — if indeed, as reports suggest, it intends to — we do have clues from the way it waged the war until now.

In particular, the army’s three-month operation in northern Gaza that preceded the ceasefire provided something of a test case for mass expulsion, based on the so-called Generals’ Plan. By isolating three cities from the rest of the Strip, subjecting them to intense bombardment, and denying the entry of any humanitarian aid, Israel managed to forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of people. It is not hard to imagine that a renewed ground invasion could herald a similar move scaled up to encompass the whole enclave. How successful such an endeavour would be remains to be seen.

But Israel’s 15-month onslaught also exhibited another impetus which, albeit not an official war aim, appears to have guided much of the military’s policy in Gaza: an effort to bring about conditions that make it impossible to sustain life.

There is simply no other way to explain the starving of an entire population while attacking food distribution centres and aid convoys; the shutting off of water pipes and denial of electricity to desalination plants; the systematic destruction of health care facilities, abduction of medical staff, and restrictions on foreign health workers; the razing of entire towns and neighbourhoods; and the attempt to terminate the only organization capable of preventing total humanitarian collapse. Even after the ceasefire took hold, Israel has continued to prevent the entry of mobile homes into Gaza in violation of the agreement, ensuring that stable life cannot return to the Strip.

In this sense, Israel had already laid the foundations for the eradication of Gaza’s population before Trump even came to office. As Meron Rapoport wrote last month, the president’s speech at the White House merely gave Israel’s visions of ethnic cleansing a “Made in America” stamp of approval. ▼

Ben Reiff is an editor at +972 and Vashti.