How Israel’s ‘plan’ for Gaza could turbocharge ethnic cleansing
Displaced Palestinians receive hot meals distributed by aid organizations in Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza, 5 May 2025
Mat Nashed and Maram Humaid report in Al Jazeera on 7 May 2025:
Israel’s far-right government has approved a “plan” to carve up and ethnically cleanse Gaza, analysts told Al Jazeera.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the plan, couching it in claims that its goal is to dismantle Hamas and retrieve the 24 or so living captives taken from Israel on October 7, 2023. Asserting that the “powerful operation in Gaza” was necessary, he went on to emphasise that “there will be a movement of the population to protect it.”
Here’s what you need to know:
What is this ‘plan’?
Israel will expel hundreds of thousands of hungry Palestinians from the north of Gaza and confine them in six encampments.
It says food will be provided to the Palestinians in these encampments, and that it will allow aid groups and private security contractors to distribute it. Palestinians will be forced to move – or starve.
Some 5,000 to 6,000 families will be pushed into each camp, according to The Washington Post. Each household will send someone to trek miles to pick up a weekly food parcel from what the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Jan Egeland called “concentration hubs”.