Israel's Ethnic Cleansing Plan

Israel’s plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza outlined
This story is here on Haaretz but is paywalled so we are reproducing this piece from Gideon Levy in full here:
 
Adolf Eichmann began his Nazi career as the head of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration at the security agency charged with protecting the Reich. Joseph Brunner, the father of Mossad chief David Barnea, was three years old when he fled Nazi Germany with his parents, before the evacuation plan was implemented. 

Last week, Barnea, the grandson, visited Washington in order to discuss the "evacuation" of the Gaza Strip's population. Barak Ravid reported on Channel 12 News that Barnea told his interlocutors that Israel has already begun talks with three countries on this issue, and the irony of history hid its face in shame. A grandson of a refugee of ethnic cleansing in Germany discusses ethnic cleansing, and no memory comes to mind.

In order to "evacuate" two million people from their country, you need a plan. Israel has been working on one. The first stage involves transferring much of the population into a concentration camp in order to facilitate an efficient deportation. 

Last week, the BBC published an investigative report based on satellite photos, showing systematic destruction carried out by the IDF across the Gaza Strip. Village after village is being wiped off the face of the earth, which is being flattened for the sake of constructing the concentration camp, so that life in Gaza will no longer be possible. 

Preparations for the first Israeli concentration camp are in full swing. Systematic destruction is proceeding throughout the enclave so that there is nowhere to return to other than the concentration camp.

In order to carry out this work, bulldozers are required. The BBC presented two wanted ads. One described "a project involving the demolition of buildings in Gaza requires (40-ton) bulldozer operators. The job includes payment of 1,200 shekels ($357) a day, including food and lodging, with an option of obtaining a private vehicle." The second ad said that "work hours are Sunday to Thursday, from 7 A.M. to 4:45 P.M., with excellent working conditions."

Israel is quietly perpetrating a crime against humanity. Not a house here and a house there, no "operational necessities," but a systematic elimination of any chance of life there, while preparing the infrastructure for concentrating people in a "humanitarian" city intended to be a transit camp – before deportation to Libya, Ethiopia and Indonesia, the destinations Barnea specified, according to Channel 12. 

That is the plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Someone conceived it, there were discussions of pros and cons, alternatives were suggested, options of total cleansing vs. stages, and all done in air-conditioned conference rooms with minutes taken and decisions made. For the first time since the war of revenge in Gaza began, it's clear that Israel has a plan – and it's a far-reaching one.

This is no longer a rolling war. One can no longer accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of waging a war with no purpose. There is a purpose to this war, and it's a criminal one. One can no longer tell army commanders that their troops are dying for no reason: They are dying in a war of ethnic cleansing. 

The ground is ready, one can move to the transfer of people, the want ads are on their way. After moving the population is completed, and the residents of the humanitarian city start missing their lives among the ruins, amid hunger, disease and bombing, it will be possible to move to the final stage: forcible placement on trucks and planes en route to the new and longed-for homeland – Libya, Indonesia or Ethiopia. 

If the humanitarian aid enterprise took the lives of hundreds of people, the deportation will take the lives of tens of thousands. But nothing will block Israel on its way to realizing its plan.

Yes, there is a plan, and it's more diabolical than it appears to be. At some point, people sat down and concocted this plot. It would be naïve to think that all this happened on its own. In 50 years, the minutes will be released, and we will learn who was in favor and who opposed this plan. Who thought of perhaps leaving one hospital intact. 

Along with the officers and politicians, there were also engineers, architects, demographers and people from the budget division. Maybe there were representatives from the Health Ministry. We will find out all in 50 years.

Meanwhile, the head of the Central Agency for Palestinian Emigration, David Barnea, has implemented an additional stage. He is an obedient senior official, having never caused friction with those above him. Does that sound familiar? He is the hero of the campaign for mass amputations through walkie-talkies. If you send him to save hostages, he goes. If you send him to prepare the deportation of millions of people? Not a problem for him. After all, he is only obeying orders.

'You Cannot Destroy a People Without First Destroying Their Healers': Israel’s War on Gaza's Medical System
Palestinian health workers face a grim choice: serve and be targeted, or flee and abandon your patients to die.
Dr. Thaer Ahmad Jul 24

The healthcare system in Gaza is not simply collapsing – it is being dismantled by design through targeted killing, abduction, and imprisonment of Palestinian doctors, nurses, and first responders.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli authorities have abducted more than 400 Palestinian medical professionals – a systematic erasure of those tasked with preserving life. Some remain in custody. Some have been released and recount harrowing abuse. Others have not survived.

Just this Monday, Israeli forces seized Dr. Marwan al-Hummas, the director of Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah. That same day, they raided the World Health Organization's staff residence in Deir al-Balah, mistreating and detaining WHO staff and family members. One staff member is still being held, the WHO chief said on Wednesday.

These are not isolated war crimes. Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system are part of a broader strategy to render the territory unlivable for Palestinians – a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

A Grim Choice
For me, these assaults are personal. In early 2024, I worked at Nasser Hospital. Israeli forces later stormed the facility, destroyed parts of its infrastructure, expelled displaced civilians seeking shelter inside, and detained dozens of staff, including doctors. Some were later released, beaten, and broken. Others never came back.

One of my colleagues at Nasser lost his son in an airstrike. Still, he stayed behind to care for survivors – his way of coping. He was arrested during the raid and remains in custody.

This is the grim choice every Palestinian medical worker faces: serve and be targeted, or flee and abandon your patients to die.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician from northern Gaza, is one of those still detained. He’s been imprisoned without charge since December. His family tells me he’s still wearing the same winter clothes he was taken in, now threadbare from seven months of captivity. He’s lost an alarming amount of weight on two spoonfuls of rice a day and faced severe abuse. He has no access to medication. No access to medical care. Dr. Hussam should be at a hospital helping to lead Gaza’s recovery. Instead, he’s in a prison cell.

Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, is treated by colleagues for his injuries following an Israeli strike on Nov. 23, 2024. Israel abducted him a little over a month later. Photo by AFP via Getty Images
What was his crime? Staying. He refused to abandon newborns on ventilators at Kamal Adwan Hospital. He stayed and saved lives in a hospital under attack. For that, he was kidnapped.

He is not alone.

Dr. Marwan Al-Sultan, one of only two cardiologists left in northern Gaza and director of the Indonesian hospital, was killed this month by a precise Israeli airstrike on his home in Gaza City that targeted the floors where he and his family lived and left the other parts of the block untouched.

Dr. Ahmed Qandeel, a respected senior surgeon and mentor, was killed just over a week ago in an airstrike in Gaza City.

Dr. Adnan  Al‑Bursh, a well-known orthopedic surgeon, was abducted, severely beaten in custody (leaving him with broken ribs and unable to walk or use the toilet independently, according to his fellow detainees’ testimony), and found dead under suspicious circumstances in Israeli custody.

There are too many stories to recount.

As the UN Human Rights Office said, ''The killing, detention and enforced disappearance of health workers in Gaza, in parallel with the systematic attacks and destruction of hospitals and other medical facilities, has had a devastating impact on the people.''

Each time a Palestinian doctor is killed or detained, it isn’t just a personal loss – it’s a collapse of community care. Patients are left without treatment. Wards are left without leadership. Babies in incubators lose their only chance of survival. A respected and dignified member of society is stripped of protected status. The death of a physician in Gaza means dozens, sometimes hundreds, of preventable deaths in the weeks and months that follow.

This is what we mean when we say Gaza’s healthcare system is under attack – from every direction.

It’s Israel’s Strategy
During my time at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis and later at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah last year, I treated patients with limited supplies, under constant threat. We worked through airstrikes. Bullet holes pierced the windows where staff would take a break. My subsequent attempts to enter Gaza as a volunteer doctor – most recently in June – have been denied by Israeli authorities, further evidence of Israel’s efforts to restrict the support and reinforcement of Palestinian healthcare capacity.

From my time at Nasser Hospital.
It is important to understand that the targeting of Palestinian healthcare workers is not incidental. It is a strategy. You cannot destroy a society without first destroying its ability to heal. You cannot erase a people without attacking those who preserve life.

Imagine trying to rebuild a healthcare system when so many of its best-trained professionals are dead, imprisoned, or traumatized. Who will perform surgeries when there are no surgeons? Who will care for premature infants when there are no pediatricians? Who will deliver babies when OB-GYNs have vanished? The answer is not more international volunteer doctors or NGOs attempting to fill in the gaps.

This must end.

I urge the international medical community, human rights organizations, and all people of conscience to demand the immediate release of detained healthcare workers. As of today, 28 senior members of the Gaza medical establishment – consultants and specialists in general, vascular and orthopaedic surgery, anaesthesiology, intensive care, cardiology, paediatrics, and obstetrics and gynaecology – are being arbitrarily detained by Israeli authorities, according to the Palestinian medical NGO Healthcare Workers Watch.

Their imprisonment violates international law and basic human decency. Their absence cripples an entire people’s ability to heal. The stakes for Palestinian healthcare workers are incredibly high, and the pressure is immense, but we mustn’t allow them to shoulder this burden alone. Our credibility and legitimacy are tied to their safety and success.

The work of rebuilding Gaza will be long and painful. But it cannot begin until a ceasefire is secured, Israeli troops withdraw, and Gaza's doctors are freed – literally and figuratively – from the chains placed upon them.

You cannot destroy a society without first destroying its ability to heal. You cannot erase a people without attacking those who preserve life.

Dr. Thaer Ahmad is a Palestinian-American emergency room physician from Chicago. He traveled to Gaza in 2024 with humanitarian aid organizations and worked at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis and Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah.

I have never felt so shaken.

Children are dying of hunger. Falling one after another, like petals of a dying flower. Under our watch.

How do you sleep, Presidents, Foreign Ministers, political leaders, diplomats, civil servants - doing nothing to stop Israel’s starvation… — Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur

It Shouldn’t Have Taken This Much For Mainstream Voices To Start Speaking Up About Gaza  By Caitlin Johnstone July 29, 2025

Israel’s top human rights group B’Tselem has finally declared that Israel is committing genocide, as has the Israel-based Physicians for Human Rights. The Israeli organizations join Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN human rights experts, and the overwhelming majority of leading authorities on the subject of genocide in their conclusion. 

The debate is over. The Israel apologists lost. And we are seeing this reflected in mainstream discourse. 

Pop megastar Ariana Grande has started speaking out in support of Gaza, telling her social media followers that “starving people to death is a red line.” This is a new threshold. Opposing Israel’s genocide is now the most mainstream as it has ever been.

MSNBC just ran a piece explicitly titled “Israel is starving Gaza. And the U.S. is complicit.”, featuring a segment with the virulently pro-Israel Morning Joe slamming the mass atrocity. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, himself a former AIPAC employee, has done a 180 and is now raking Israel over the coals on the air for its deliberately engineered starvation campaign. The New York Times finally overcame its phobia of the g-word with an op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

We’re now seeing notoriously Zionist swamp monsters in the Democratic Party like Barack Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar changing their tune and attacking Netanyahu and Trump for their joint genocide project in Gaza, with increasingly forceful pushback from some on the right like Marjorie Taylor Greene as well.

As western pundits, politicians and celebrities suddenly pivot to denouncing Israel’s genocidal atrocities after two years of silence, it’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago we were being told that saying “death to the IDF” is a hate crime.

People who’ve been staring at this genocide from the beginning have been asking the entire time, what is it going to take? What will it take for our society to stop sleepwalking through inane trivialities and vapid distractions and start opposing the holocaust of our day?

Raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp packed full of children wasn’t enough.

Burning children alive wasn’t enough.

Systematically destroying Gaza’s entire healthcare infrastructure — up to and including entering hospitals they’ve attacked and destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one — wasn’t enough.

Killing more journalists than were killed in both World Wars plus the US Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing war in Ukraine wasn’t enough.

The systemic rape and torture of prisoners wasn’t enough.

IDF soldiers routinely sharing photos and videos of themselves mockingly dressing in the clothes of dead and displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead and displaced Palestinian children wasn’t enough.

Israeli officials openly expressing genocidal intent for the people of Gaza wasn’t enough.

The US president and Israeli prime minister openly declaring their goal of the complete ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian territory wasn’t enough.

Field testing new weapons of war on Palestinians like they’re guinea pigs in a laboratory wasn’t enough.

Leaving countless civilians to slowly suffocate or die of dehydration trapped under the rubble of bombed buildings wasn’t enough.

Creating an AI system to ensure that suspected Hamas fighters are bombed when they’re at home with their children and naming it “Where’s Daddy?” wasn’t enough.

Using Palestinians as human shields wasn’t enough.

Burying injured civilians alive with bulldozers wasn’t enough.

The IDF admitting to running a popular Telegram channel called “72 Virgins” which posted extremely gory and sadistic snuff films of people in Gaza being butchered by Israeli forces wasn’t enough.

IDF snipers routinely shooting children in the head and chest throughout the Gaza Strip wasn’t enough.

The IDF flying drones which play the sounds of crying babies at night in order to lure out hiding civilians to murder them wasn’t enough.

IDF troops telling the Israeli press that they’re being ordered to massacre starving civilians seeking food from aid sites wasn’t enough.

Israeli snipers targeting different body parts of starving civilians on designated days — leg day, head day, genitals day, etc — wasn’t enough.

Far right Israeli citizens setting up blockades to stop aid trucks from entering Gaza while they enjoyed parties and barbecues at the blockade sites wasn’t enough.  

Using lies and propaganda to dismantle the aid system for bringing essential food and life-supporting supplies into Gaza, to replace it with a US/Israeli op where aid seekers are massacred every single day, wasn’t enough.

Using siege warfare to deliberately starve Gaza for the previous 22 months wasn’t enough.

But now that starvation has hit a critical point and deaths from malnutrition are skyrocketing, now that images of dead skeletal children are filling our screens, now that the damage to organs and brains from starvation will be irreversible in many cases — now it’s enough.

That was the line, apparently. That’s what mainstream western consciousness has decided is too much. Everything up until that line was fine, but now it’s not fine anymore.

And the killing is still going on. The sudden awakening of conscience hasn’t translated into any material actions or changes at all yet. If it had come in October or November 2023 like it should have we might be seeing that opposition translate into actually saving Gaza by now, but the light has only just been switched on. It’s not even guaranteed that those who are speaking up will continue to do so.

I’m glad people are waking up to the cruel reality of this nightmare. I’m grateful to each and every influential voice who uses their platform to speak out, even at this late date. I truly am.  But I also think we need to take a very hard, very uncomfortable look at ourselves as a society right now. If all those monstrous abuses were tolerable for us over these last two years, there’s something deeply and profoundly sick about our civilization.

We are not living right. We are not thinking right. We are not feeling right. We are warped and twisted. The information we consume and the norms we’ve been conditioned to accept have corrupted our souls.

We have been made into something bad. Something ugly. Something shameful. Something we need to do everything in our power to change.

We need to rescue ourselves from what we have become. We need to transform, deeply and radically, into something that could never again allow something like this to occur.

The way things are clearly isn’t working. The mainstream worldview is clearly a lie. Everything we’ve been taught to believe about our society, our nation, our government and our world was clearly false.  We need to fight our way through the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that our entire way of looking at things as a collective has failed, and we need to find a new way of being.  Otherwise we’re going to keep being smashed in the face with increasingly horrifying reminders of what we have allowed ourselves to become.

The lessons will repeat until they are learned.  We had better start learning them.

Who Says Israel Is Committing a Genocide in Gaza? Everyone on This List

After almost two years, more and more politicians, experts, and human rights groups are finally using the G-word to describe Israel's violence in Gaza, but the list is still relatively short.  Prem Thakker and Team Zeteo, Jul 29

Palestinians and a limited number of others had been warning of the high likelihood of Israel’s genocide of Palestine almost right away in October 2023 – and even before. That didn’t require unique prescience. It just required taking Israeli leaders at their own word, or simply listening to the Palestinian victims and journalists bearing the brunt of this genocidal violence.

Now, after 22 months of Israel's relentless attacks on Gaza that have killed tens of thousands (and horribly, likely far more), displaced the entire population (often more than once), and decimated homes, hospitals, schools, water systems, and other critical infrastructure, more are finally starting to come around to the horrible reality.

Here’s a list of the US politicians, nations, and organizations that have identified Israel’s genocide as a “genocide”:

US Politicians
Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)
Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)
Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)
Summer Lee (D-Pa.)
Al Green (D-Tex.)
Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.)
Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.)
John Garamendi (D-Calif.)
Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)

Nations
Afghanistan
Algeria
Bangladesh
Belize
Bolivia
Brazil
Chile
Colombia
Comoros
Cuba
Djibouti
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Ireland
Jordan
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Lebanon
Libya
Malaysia
Maldives
Namibia
Nicaragua
Oman
Palestine
Pakistan
Qatar
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Saudi Arabia
Slovenia
South Africa
Spain
Syria
Tunisia
Turkey
Venezuela
Yemen

Human Rights Organizations

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
Amnesty International
Human Rights Watch
University Network for Human Rights
B’Tselem

Genocide Scholars and Experts
Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories
Omer Bartov, Israeli-American professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University
Amos Goldberg, Israeli professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a fellow of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute
Raz Segal, Israeli historian and associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and endowed professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University
Shmuel Lederman, professor specializing in political theory and genocide studies at the Open University of Israel

Martin Shaw, emeritus professor of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex, research professor at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals, and author of War and Genocide, What is Genocide, Genocide in International Relations
William Schabas, professor of international law at Middlesex University in the United Kingdom, professor of international human law and human rights at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and author of several books on international law, including Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes
Dirk Moses, international relations professor at the City College of New York and author of The Problems of Genocide
Daniel Blatman, Israeli historian specializing in the history of the Holocaust and head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Lee Mordechai, Israeli historian and associate professor at Hebrew University
Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars
Uğur Ümit Üngör, professor of Genocide Studies at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies and the University of Amsterdam