Since breaking the ceasefire in March, Israel has aimed to render Gaza uninhabitable, to drive it towards total collapse, and thereby to prevent anyone from staying or returning.
The strip has been bombed like never before. Vast areas have been transformed into shoot-on-sight killing fields. Israeli-backed ‘American Aid’ distribution sites have been set up: slaughter houses, where dozens of unarmed Palestinians are gunned down daily while queuing for food and water.
Now, Netanyahu has announced what this is all leading up to: the ‘humanitarian city’, a concentration camp from which the Palestinians would eventually be expelled from Gaza entirely.
Forever war
For almost two years, the people of Gaza have been subjected to hell on earth. Six Hiroshima’s worth of explosives have been dropped on this tiny enclave. All the pillars of civilised life – healthcare, power, sanitation, water, roads – have been destroyed. More journalists have been killed than in the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War combined as they have been deliberately and systematically targeted. 1,400 medics have been killed in a deliberate policy of assassinating medical professionals. The “most moral army in the world” has not held back from any war crime to inflict terror, destruction, and chaos.
But for all this, Israel has not won. Hamas survives and fights. Whatever Israel conquers, new fighters appear as their ranks replenished by the endless reserve of those driven to take up arms by the appalling massacres. 23 hostages remain in Gaza, presumed alive.
Although the majority of Israelis would be willing to see the end of the war if the hostages are returned, the hostages are the last thing on Netanyahu’s mind. His political survival depends entirely on far-right Jewish supremacist parties like those of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. They want nothing short of a second Nakba.
In order to hold onto power, Netanyahu has been compelled to continue the war.
But with a political settlement ruled out, and with no path to defeating Hamas militarily, he sees the solution put forward by his fanatical allies as the only way to end the war: ethnic cleansing.
Genocide
Since tearing up the ceasefire, Netanyahu has doubled down. He announced a new offensive, ‘Operation Gideon Chariots’, which aims to “conquer” and permanently occupy Gaza.
Entire cites have been razed and demolished. Plague and banditry have been encouraged. Everything is being done to turn Gaza into an inhospitable wasteland.
As of July, 85 percent of Gaza has been ‘evacuated’ and placed under military control. Those who remain are considered legitimate targets for snipers, artillery or grenade-armed drones. These ‘no-go zones’ are not marked. As one IDF officer told reporters: “The Palestinians learn through blood.”
After the population is forced out, the ruins are flattened. All the buildings within a kilometre of Gaza’s border are being bulldozed and turned into a “buffer zone”, including the entirety of Rafah. This work has been outsourced to civilian contractors, who are paid thousands of dollars per house demolished.
Meanwhile, airstrikes have intensified on ‘security’ and ‘safe’ zones alike, to rain terror and death on the population. Hundreds of civilians are being killed weekly. Ambulances, children queuing for water, and even policemen have been bombed. The logic of this is to deliberately unravel the social order in Gaza.
The UN describes Gaza as breaking down into lawless anarchy, with “rampant looting”, “mob justice”, “extortion of money”, “random shootings”, “fighting for space and resources”, and “youths armed with sticks manning barricades”.
In Rafah, for example, power has shifted to Abu Shabab’s gang of “convicted murderers, thieves, collaborators, drug dealers or members of ISIS”, who last year carried out the “biggest looting of UN aid anywhere, ever”.
But for the Israeli’s, these bandits are an asset. Just as they once funded Hamas to undermine the PLO, they are now backing these cutthroats as a rival to Hamas. Shabab, who was previously linked to ISIS, was a common drug dealer before the war. Now his gang has rebranded itself as the ‘Popular Forces’, and is being armed and paid by Israel to guard the few aid convoys still permitted into Gaza.
Already, Gaza was one of the most densely populated areas on earth. But this campaign of systematic destruction and terror has crammed most of 1.7 million people remaining in the south – starving, displaced and traumatised – into an area covering just 16 percent of the Strip, an endless city of tents amid rubble, with no working infrastructure. By inflicting desolation and chaos, Netanyahu intends to leave the Gazans with only two options: to flee or perish. As he put it:
“We’re destroying more and more homes – they have nowhere to return to. The only natural outcome will be that Gazans will want to emigrate out of the Strip. Our main problem is with receiving countries.”
The final piece in the puzzle to make Gaza truly unlivable was to cut off aid and starve the population into submission.
This was tested in Northern Gaza. Since October last year, it has been cut off from the south by Israel’s Netzarim corridor, and no food, water, fuel or aid has been allowed in. The 400,000 residents were effectively told to ‘leave or die’. Now it is on the edge of a famine, with reports of catastrophic levels of starvation, dehydration, and even the eating of animal food and grass.
While this was taking place, the West cried crocodile tears, delivered stern warnings, and set deadlines… but didn’t raise a finger to stop this appalling atrocity. That reassured Netanyahu that he could do the same across the rest of Gaza.
So, from 2 March 2025 – during the ‘ceasefire’ – to May 19, Israel blocked any aid from coming into Gaza at all. The entire population was pushed to the brink of famine.
‘Humanitarianism’
This, however, posed a political problem for Netanyahu. The ‘democrats’ of the West have continued to support and enable Israel even though it has fire-bombed refugee camps, tied up and executed medics, and tortured and raped prisoners, among many, many other war crimes. But a full-scale, artificial famine under Israel’s watch – which would lead to mass deaths and images of skeletal children – would put its allies in an impossible position. As Netanyahu admitted in May:
“Even our closest allies in the world – US senators I know personally and who have been staunch, unconditional supporters of Israel for decades – are coming to me and saying: ‘We are giving you all the support to achieve victory… but there’s one thing we cannot accept: images of mass starvation…’”
Though Netanyahu depends on the far right, Israel itself depends entirely on money and weapons from the West, and most of all America. As Israel is the only reliable guardian of western interests in the Middle East, that support runs deep. But it is not unlimited.
In other words, just as the war in Iraq was sold as a campaign for ‘freedom and democracy’, the genocide in Gaza required a fig leaf.
Enter the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (GHF).
This so-called “aid organisation” was set up in May to manage aid distribution. As a private, non-profit organisation it is designed to give Israel plausible deniability, like America’s Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq.
In practice, the GHF was created on Netanyahu’s initiative and operates in close collaboration with the IDF. It is headed by close allies of Netanyahu and Trump – including former US “security contractors” like Philip Francis Reilly, who helped train the Mujahideen and the Contras – and received $50 million in funding from the Trump administration.
It is a tool for carrying out Israel’s war aims – to use starvation as a weapon to depopulate Gaza – with the thinnest of ‘ethical’ covers. From the outset of the war, Israel has tried to dismantle the existing humanitarian system in Gaza, and above all, UNRWA. Yet it couldn’t just cut off aid altogether. Instead, it has sought to take control of the distribution of the necessaries of life by replacing the UN’s system with a militarised, subordinate alternative.
GHF is that alternative. Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich put it plainly:
“It will allow civilians to eat, for our friends in the world to continue to provide us with an international umbrella of protection against the Security Council and The Hague Tribunal, and for us to continue to fight, God willing, until victory.”
With three of the distribution sites located around Rafah, it is another means of luring the population into Israel’s ‘safe zone’.
And even if it prevents a famine, the 1.7 million people who now depend on it are being deliberately kept on the edge of starvation. The UN operated 400 aid sites across Gaza. The GHF operates four. Whereas 600 lorries were coming in per day during the ceasefire, GHF is distributing 19 lorry loads a day. The rations themselves are often rotten and infested with weevils. Allegedly, some have even found oxycodone hidden in the flour bags.
First-hand accounts from these ‘American aid’ sites – as the Palestinians call them – beggar belief. They are designed to be as inhumane as possible and resemble, as one of the GHF contractors described them, “killing fields.”
For food and water, Palestinians must trek through miles of ruined ‘military exclusion zones’, where they risk arbitrary execution. Once they arrive, the ‘distribution sites’ are just large dirt clearings partitioned with razor wire fences, like cattle chutes. Thousands of Palestinians are forced to queue until the GHF mercenaries let them all rush in all at once. Desperate chaos ensues. As an Israeli researcher commented:
“It reminds me most of how you feed dangerous animals. You toss the food in a pile, retreat, and let them in from afar.”
Those distributing the aid are not humanitarian workers. They are unqualified, unvetted, heavily armed mercenaries. They manage the crowds with machine guns. As one IDF soldier explained:
“Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the centre opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.
“There’s no danger to the forces… I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”
Around the sites are Israeli military zones. In this “wild west”, individual IDF commanders have jurisdiction to snipe, mortar and shell what they refer to as a “zombie horde”. Informally, the IDF refers to this ‘game’ as “Operation Salted Fish”, after the Israeli version of “Red light, green light”.
875 Palestinians have been massacred at these ‘humanitarian’ slaughterhouses so far.
‘Final solution’
Earlier this month, Defence Minister Israel Katz revealed the next stage of the campaign. A ‘humanitarian city’ will be erected on the ruins of Rafah, first housing 600,000, and eventually all two million Gazans. To enter this ‘safe haven’, inmates would be screened. Inside, they would be guarded by an international task force, ‘deradicalised’, and fed, as Netanyahu put it, “Ben and Jerry’s, for all I care.”
It would be a vast concentration camp, a holding pen for the Palestinians to await their expulsion. Once inside, the Palestinians would not be allowed to leave, except to other countries. A government bureau has been set up to oversee ‘voluntary departures’. And the US and Israel are lobbying the governments of countries like Libya, Chad and Rwanda to take the displaced (with no success).
All this is an attempt to bring to life Trump’s ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ plan: to flatten Gaza, deport the survivors, and sell the land to developers. Already, consultancy groups like BCG and the Blair Foundation have been paid millions to draw up fantastic plans for the ‘paradise’ that could be built atop the rubble and mass graves of Gaza. Leaked PowerPoint slides include an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone” and highways named after the dictators of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
This is an attempt at a ‘final solution’ to Gaza: one intended to satisfy the far right, who demand genocide; liberals, who need the atrocities to be cloaked in the language of ‘humanitarianism’; and capitalist parasites, who see money to be made in ‘redeveloping’ Gaza.
It is no solution at all.
There is not even really a ‘plan’. Even the vague blueprints that Netanyahu has put forward are totally unrealisable. It is estimated, for example, that it would cost Israeli taxpayers $4 billion to build and $2.7 billion a year in upkeep. Israel is already mired in a profound economic crisis: military costs are ballooning, and tourism, trade and investment have all plummeted.
Moreover, we are talking about the IDF running a tiny, militarised compound of 2 million people amid utter desolation. As the head of the IDF said:
“To control these people who are hungry and angry could lead to a loss of control and, as a result of that loss of control, they could turn on the IDF.”
Even if the Palestinians could be gathered here, what next? None of the Arab regimes would willingly agree to take these refugees. Already Egypt and Jordan are seething, their populations enraged by collaboration of their rulers with the genocide. A crime of this magnitude would set the Middle East on fire.
In the West, too, the encampments and the Palestine solidarity movement have shown that the workers of the world would not consent to stand by and watch as their governments assist a second Nakba.
The génocidaires have made themselves responsible for the two million starving, homeless, suffering Palestinians trapped in this uninhabitable ruin, with no plan for what to do with them.
Throughout this ‘war’, Netanyahu has been driven by the interests of his own political survival. Compelled by his far-right allies, he has stumbled, atrocity after atrocity, towards a genocide, with no care for the consequences so long as he could keep his government limping along. The ‘humanitarian city’ is his attempt to escape from this forever war, and rid Israel of the catastrophe that it has created. But there is no end in sight.
Pressure is mounting. This week, two parties have withdrawn from Netanyahu’s coalition, leaving him with a minority government. Again, his far-right allies are pushing him to undermine the renewed attempts at a ceasefire, to press ahead with the ‘humanitarian’ plans.
But the IDF is overstretched – in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria – fatigue is setting in, and morale is starting to crack. Suicides are increasing amongst IDF troops, and ever fewer are volunteering to enlist. Inside Gaza, Hamas has reconstituted into a formidable guerrilla force. Instead of trying to hold territory or using regular weapons, it is resorting to hit and run attacks, using Israel’s own unexploded ordinances as IEDs, and is successfully sending scores of IDF troops home in body bags.
On the other hand, Netanyahu’s criminal designs are facing opposition inside Israel. Anger is growing that he has abandoned the hostages, and soldiers and politicians are attacking his plan as a ‘concentration camp’. In the West, too, anger is swelling in response to the latest atrocities. Netanyahu is walking a tightrope.
This is undeniably a genocide, unfolding in full view of the world. The official death count is 58,479, but this is a vast, vast underestimate. Genocide under the name of ‘self-defence’. Drug-dealing gangsters presented as ‘popular anti-Hamas forces’. Killing fields under the name of ‘humanitarian aid’. A concentration camp under the name of ‘humanitarian city’. All of this has been achieved with the active assistance of the ‘leaders of the free world’.
