Gaza will be concentration camp, declares Netanyahu

His colleague, meanwhile, says Gaza will be destroyed. Genocide in plain sight

Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has announced that they are going to permanently seize Gaza and drive its surviving population into the south. In common parlance, this is known as a concentration camp. Combine this with what Netanyahu declared just over a month ago, when he refuted claims that had been made about Israel’s strategy. He said:

The second claim – that we are unwilling to discuss the final stage. This is also incorrect. We are willing. Hamas will lay down its weapons. Its leaders will be allowed to leave.

We will see to the general security in the Gaza Strip and will allow the realization of the Trump plan for voluntary migration. This is the plan. We are not hiding this and are ready to discuss it at any time.

What Netanyahu openly declared there is his desire for the entire Palestinian population of Gaza to go, with ‘voluntary migration’ clearly being a perverse nonsense: it simply means making the conditions of life so unbearable that survivors seek to flee, with the destruction of all the pillars of life and civilisation - a healthcare system, agricultural and food production, clean fresh water supplies, education, infrastructure, and so on.

Israel is openly, in other words, planning a concentration camp in which Palestinians will be left with a choice: leave, or die. Indeed the Israeli general Giora Eiland, the former head of the Israeli National Security Council who acted as an advisor to the former defence minister Yoav Gallant, set out this strategy way back in October 2023, when he wrote:

“Israel should not allow any economic assistance. The people should be told that they have two choices; to stay and to starve, or to leave. If Egypt and other countries prefer that these people will perish in Gaza, this is their choice. I prefer something that is more reasonable.”

This was written, incidentally, in a journal called Fathom, which is the journal of BICOM, the so-called British Israel Communications and Research Centre, a key component of Britain’s Israel lobby which, for instance, flies MPs and journalists out on trips to Israel.

We should note, too, an article in Axios penned by Barak Ravid, an Israeli journalist and former Israeli intelligence officer, entitled ‘Israel plans to occupy and flatten all of Gaza if no deal by Trump's trip’.

He states, and I quote:

Israel has set President Trump's visit to the Middle East next week as a deadline for a new hostage and ceasefire deal, with a massive ground operation to commence if no deal is reached, Israeli officials say.

Now we should note that there was a ceasefire deal in place based on a hostage prisoner swap. That was in separate phases, allowing for Israeli hostages to be released in exchange for Palestinian detainees, many of whom are in practise themselves hostages - Palestinians civilians who have been captured by the Israeli forces under false pretences, many of them having been charged or convicted with absolutely nothing, including many children. That deal provided for all the Israeli hostages to be released, with a permanent end to any violence.

But Israel unilaterally broke that ceasefire, and indeed broke it with a massive sudden onslaught against Gaza which butchered hundreds of Palestinians, many of them children

Barak Ravid reports that as well as permanently seizing Gaza, Israel plans to “flatten any buildings that remain standing and displace virtually the entire population of 2 million people to a single "humanitarian area."”

Well obviously “humanitarian area” is despicable Orwellian framing for what is in practise a concentration camp - quite literally concentrating a civilian population in an encampment, with a view to gradually ensure none of that population remains in Gaza. And indeed this so-called plan involves the total destruction of any remaining infrastructure.

Clearly as it is Israel has obliterated Gaza, with almost all homes damaged or destroyed, every single hospital attacked and most left inoperable, as well as the mass destruction of schools, universities, libraries, mosques, churches, you name it. Within weeks of the genocide beginning, Gaza had been left a different colour and texture when looked at from space because of the level of destruction inflicted on it.

But the total destruction of all remaining buildings is itself a confession of a war crime - it is strictly prohibited to attack civilian infrastructure when there is no military purpose.

It is being briefed by Axios and others that this plan could simply be pressure, designed to coerce Hamas into striking a deal. Well Hamas already struck a deal with Israel which was torpedoed by Israel and in any case they have predictably Hamas has issued the following statement:

There is no sense in engaging in talks or considering new ceasefire proposals as long as the hunger war and extermination war continue in the Gaza Strip.

There is no attempt by Israel to hide what it is doing. Bezalel Smotrich is Israel’s finance minister, and he said:

Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to ... the south to a humanitarian zone without Hamas or terrorism, and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.

It should be said that no such third country exists, no country has said they will take Palestinians, with Egypt and Jordan’s regimes correctly noting this would make them party to the crime of ethnic cleansing. What will simply happen is the conditions of life will be stripped away so that Palestinians will continue to perish in large numbers.

According to the brilliant Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi:

Based on what has been witnessed, the destruction in Rafah over just the 3 past days is unprecedented. Entire neighborhoods have been leveled—this is the most intense wave of demolition since the genocide in Gaza began.

It is pure annihilation of the city—no exaggeration.

Rafah, bear in mind, is the main city in the south and was previously the urban area which had suffered the least amount of destruction.

Let’s note what Netanyahu said on 11th January 2024:

Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population.

Clearly this was a lie, and anyone who wasn’t delusional, ignorant or wilfully deceptive knew that at the time - indeed enough other Israeli leaders and officials had said more than enough at the time for us to be clear what Israel was going to do.

On 10th October 2023, an Israeli security source told Israeli television: "Gaza will eventually become a tent city. There will be no buildings.”

A day earlier, the then defence minister Yoav Gallant, told Israeli troops that he had “released all the restraints”, adding:

Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.

If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week. It will take weeks or even months,

It was clear from day one what they were going to do.

Note too that Israel has imposed a total blockade on all aid getting into Gaza since 1st March - that’s all food, water, medicine, fuel, you name it. Donald Trump this week declared that people are “starving” in Gaza.

Well there’s a confession. But he lied in the process, stating that Hamas is taking the food that’s going in. But no food is going in. There is no food to steal because there is a total blockade imposed by Israel.

What are witnessing is what was always going to happen. This is a genocide, and like every genocide in history it has stages and it has its own internal dynamic. And yet despite there being no attempt to hide the abomination taking place, the Western media overwhelmingly will not call this crime what it is, and neither will the Western governments which have armed and facilitated it. The reckoning for that will come, it’s up to us to make sure that it does.