Extermination as negotiation: Understanding Israel’s strategy in Gaza
Whether it's total conquest or managed containment, Israel doesn't have a single grand strategy for Gaza, but it uses the possibility of both to prolong the war.
May 23, 2025
MONDOWEISS
Bodies arrive at Nasser Hospital in Kha Younis following Israeli airstrikes on tent encampments, May 20, 2025. (Photo: Moaz Abu Taha/APA Images)
In the weeks since the unveiling of “Operation Gideon’s Chariots,” the renewed Israeli offensive to permanently “conquer” all of Gaza, it has become increasingly clear that Israel’s internal decision-making is not oriented toward a singular strategic endgame, but toward a recursive logic of exhaustion.
Israel isn’t choosing between total conquest and technocratic containment via an Arab-brokered ceasefire plan. Instead, it is deploying these options as devices to stretch the war and weaponize its duration rather than end it. Neither is an actual alternative to the other.
This is not a paradox, but a method. “Gideon’s Chariots,” with its objective to concentrate over two million Palestinians in Rafah and “cleanse” the remainder of Gaza, is not merely a plan of conquest. It is a fantasy of sterilization dressed in logistical rationality. Its brutality lies not only in its intentions — military and demographic — but also in its open-endedness, because it will be an occupation without governance or responsibility.
It imagines Gaza as a surgical field: empty of social density and politics, a flattened terrain where the Israeli army may operate unhindered and where civilians are transformed into captives or debris. This is where extermination can proceed behind the veil of humanitarian logistics. But this is the thing: while Israel announces its plan and leaks many of its contours, making sure that the endgame of extermination is out in the open, it also delays its fulfillment.
The rejection of the Egyptian proposal for Gaza’s postwar governance, meanwhile, functions less as a strategic rebuttal and more as a temporal maneuver: it defers the stabilization of Gaza, suspends the possibility of a postwar architecture, and secures Israel’s role as the sole arbiter of movement, aid, reconstruction, and survival. The proposal — which secured the backing of the Arab League — offered a ceasefire, the release of prisoners, and the creation of a Palestinian technocratic administration in Gaza under regional and international auspices. The governing authority would be civilian, non-Hamas, and possibly linked to the Palestinian Authority. Arab security forces, primarily from Egypt and the UAE, would maintain public order. Israel, in theory, would retain the ability to strike if Hamas rearmed, but the core logic was one of pacified governance and externally monitored reconstruction.
But this alternative, while marketed as pragmatic containment, reveals its own structure of control. It does not offer Palestinains liberation or sovereignty. It does not restore Palestinian political life. Instead, it imagines a depoliticized Gaza, administered through foreign technocrats, where governance is reduced to management and resistance is metabolized into security threats.
Yes, it ends the massacres, but it continues the process of unmaking through other means. Yes, it stops ethnic cleansing and genocide, but it only offers a minimum respite.
In this scenario, the Palestinian is rendered administrable but unrepresentable — visible in spreadsheets and surveillance systems, but invisible as a subject of history. Where “Gideon’s Chariots” proposes the elimination of the interlocutor, the Egyptian plan offers their neutralization. Where the former seeks erasure, the latter guarantees containment.
In this way, Israel is not simply fighting Hamas. It is managing the time of collapse of Gaza’s infrastructure, of regional diplomacy, and of its own internal contradictions. The so-called “plans” it circulates are not blueprints for action, but instruments of disorientation. By alternating between military escalation and diplomatic non-engagement, Israel traps adversaries and allies alike in a theatre of endless anticipation.
These plans become not resolutions, but literal traps: they embolden some, humiliate others, and erode the coherence of any alternative vision. But Israel remains within the suspended terrain of both plans. On the one hand, it seeks to retrieve its prisoners before completely wiping out Gaza. On the other, it aims to appease the Arab governments that have remained silent, have not severed their ties with Israel, and have gradually — though assuredly — offered an alternative to genocide through a politics of sterilization. Not to mention that the prospect of completely undoing the people of Gaza remains alive, serving Netanyahu’s own management of his coalition and his desire to emerge as a historic leader who decisively ended the Palestine question.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Israel’s relationship with the Gulf states. By signaling openness to normalization and regional security arrangements — while simultaneously deepening the humanitarian catastrophe — Israel forestalls clear ultimatums. The prospect of a reconfigured Gaza under Arab oversight is floated as a hypothetical, a distant possibility, while irreversible facts are manufactured on the ground: entire neighborhoods are erased, populations displaced, infrastructure reduced to dust.
Behind the language of planning lies a campaign of sterilization and condensation — a vision of Gaza not as a home, but as a holding site. Leaked reports whisper of forced transfers, of Palestinians being sent to Libya or elsewhere in Africa, sketching futures of removal dressed in the language of pragmatism. In other words, Israel maneuvers, cajoles, agrees, renges, returns to blood, and ultimately remains hesitant in fulfilling even its own plans.
But even this strategy shows signs of fatigue. The army is stretched. Reservists are exhausted. Public support, once monolithic, is now fractured, especially around the government’s inability to recover Israeli prisoners and its disregard for their lives. The political elite may posture unity, but societal cohesion is fraying. The very trust that once linked military necessity to civil legitimacy is eroding.
These signs of erosion are not only internal. The longer the war continues, the more international legitimacy Israel forfeits. The ICC warrants, the ICJ rulings, the intensifying accusations of genocide — these are not merely moral censures, but signs of the beginnings of institutional isolation.
And yet, rather than shift course, Israel doubles down, leaning into ambiguity and attrition, hoping to exhaust global outrage the way it hopes to exhaust Palestinian resistance: through delay, confusion, the normalization of collapse, and of course, through coercion by the weaponization of antisemitism.
In this moment, what Israel seeks is a “stable instability” in which Gaza is rendered uninhabitable yet governed, massacred yet silent, present yet politically nullified. Both plans — the one it executes and the one it rejects — serve this grammar. Whether through total war or managed containment, the objective remains: to erase Palestine as a subject of history, and to replace it with a population that can be controlled, administered, or vanished. Whether this will succeed remains uncertain. But the cracks are visible in the disillusionment of soldiers and in the rage of Israeli prisoners’ families.
In the weeks since the unveiling of “Operation Gideon’s Chariots,” the renewed Israeli offensive to permanently “conquer” all of Gaza, it has become increasingly clear that Israel’s internal decision-making is not oriented toward a singular strategic endgame, but toward a recursive logic of exhaustion.
Israel isn’t choosing between total conquest and technocratic containment via an Arab-brokered ceasefire plan. Instead, it is deploying these options as devices to stretch the war and weaponize its duration rather than end it. Neither is an actual alternative to the other.
This is not a paradox, but a method. “Gideon’s Chariots,” with its objective to concentrate over two million Palestinians in Rafah and “cleanse” the remainder of Gaza, is not merely a plan of conquest. It is a fantasy of sterilization dressed in logistical rationality. Its brutality lies not only in its intentions — military and demographic — but also in its open-endedness, because it will be an occupation without governance or responsibility.
It imagines Gaza as a surgical field: empty of social density and politics, a flattened terrain where the Israeli army may operate unhindered and where civilians are transformed into captives or debris. This is where extermination can proceed behind the veil of humanitarian logistics. But this is the thing: while Israel announces its plan and leaks many of its contours, making sure that the endgame of extermination is out in the open, it also delays its fulfillment.
The rejection of the Egyptian proposal for Gaza’s postwar governance, meanwhile, functions less as a strategic rebuttal and more as a temporal maneuver: it defers the stabilization of Gaza, suspends the possibility of a postwar architecture, and secures Israel’s role as the sole arbiter of movement, aid, reconstruction, and survival. The proposal — which secured the backing of the Arab League — offered a ceasefire, the release of prisoners, and the creation of a Palestinian technocratic administration in Gaza under regional and international auspices. The governing authority would be civilian, non-Hamas, and possibly linked to the Palestinian Authority. Arab security forces, primarily from Egypt and the UAE, would maintain public order. Israel, in theory, would retain the ability to strike if Hamas rearmed, but the core logic was one of pacified governance and externally monitored reconstruction.
But this alternative, while marketed as pragmatic containment, reveals its own structure of control. It does not offer Palestinains liberation or sovereignty. It does not restore Palestinian political life. Instead, it imagines a depoliticized Gaza, administered through foreign technocrats, where governance is reduced to management and resistance is metabolized into security threats.
Yes, it ends the massacres, but it continues the process of unmaking through other means. Yes, it stops ethnic cleansing and genocide, but it only offers a minimum respite.
In this scenario, the Palestinian is rendered administrable but unrepresentable — visible in spreadsheets and surveillance systems, but invisible as a subject of history. Where “Gideon’s Chariots” proposes the elimination of the interlocutor, the Egyptian plan offers their neutralization. Where the former seeks erasure, the latter guarantees containment.
In this way, Israel is not simply fighting Hamas. It is managing the time of collapse of Gaza’s infrastructure, of regional diplomacy, and of its own internal contradictions. The so-called “plans” it circulates are not blueprints for action, but instruments of disorientation. By alternating between military escalation and diplomatic non-engagement, Israel traps adversaries and allies alike in a theatre of endless anticipation.
These plans become not resolutions, but literal traps: they embolden some, humiliate others, and erode the coherence of any alternative vision. But Israel remains within the suspended terrain of both plans. On the one hand, it seeks to retrieve its prisoners before completely wiping out Gaza. On the other, it aims to appease the Arab governments that have remained silent, have not severed their ties with Israel, and have gradually — though assuredly — offered an alternative to genocide through a politics of sterilization. Not to mention that the prospect of completely undoing the people of Gaza remains alive, serving Netanyahu’s own management of his coalition and his desire to emerge as a historic leader who decisively ended the Palestine question.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Israel’s relationship with the Gulf states. By signaling openness to normalization and regional security arrangements — while simultaneously deepening the humanitarian catastrophe — Israel forestalls clear ultimatums. The prospect of a reconfigured Gaza under Arab oversight is floated as a hypothetical, a distant possibility, while irreversible facts are manufactured on the ground: entire neighborhoods are erased, populations displaced, infrastructure reduced to dust.
Behind the language of planning lies a campaign of sterilization and condensation — a vision of Gaza not as a home, but as a holding site. Leaked reports whisper of forced transfers, of Palestinians being sent to Libya or elsewhere in Africa, sketching futures of removal dressed in the language of pragmatism. In other words, Israel maneuvers, cajoles, agrees, renges, returns to blood, and ultimately remains hesitant in fulfilling even its own plans.
But even this strategy shows signs of fatigue. The army is stretched. Reservists are exhausted. Public support, once monolithic, is now fractured, especially around the government’s inability to recover Israeli prisoners and its disregard for their lives. The political elite may posture unity, but societal cohesion is fraying. The very trust that once linked military necessity to civil legitimacy is eroding.
These signs of erosion are not only internal. The longer the war continues, the more international legitimacy Israel forfeits. The ICC warrants, the ICJ rulings, the intensifying accusations of genocide — these are not merely moral censures, but signs of the beginnings of institutional isolation.
And yet, rather than shift course, Israel doubles down, leaning into ambiguity and attrition, hoping to exhaust global outrage the way it hopes to exhaust Palestinian resistance: through delay, confusion, the normalization of collapse, and of course, through coercion by the weaponization of antisemitism.
In this moment, what Israel seeks is a “stable instability” in which Gaza is rendered uninhabitable yet governed, massacred yet silent, present yet politically nullified. Both plans — the one it executes and the one it rejects — serve this grammar. Whether through total war or managed containment, the objective remains: to erase Palestine as a subject of history, and to replace it with a population that can be controlled, administered, or vanished. Whether this will succeed remains uncertain. But the cracks are visible in the disillusionment of soldiers and in the rage of Israeli prisoners’ families.
Ceasefire negotiations as a form of interrogation
The way in which Israel has conducted the ceasefire negotiations, caught in a perpetual cycle of proposals, rejections, the resumption of hostilities, and the insistence on non-starters, is rather like the dynamic between the Israeli interrogators of the Shin Bet and the Palestinian prisoners enduring their pressure tactics.
In the rooms of the Shin Bet, the manipulation of time becomes a weapon, and language becomes a tool of disorientation. Truth is not revealed through clarity or dialogue but extracted through exhaustion: physical torture, psychological games, the pretense of friendship, and promises that are easily betrayed. The goal is not to understand the subject but to unmake it — not just confession, but collapse.
“If you speak, I’ll give you a cigarette. If you name a name, you can rest. If you give us one person — just one — we might bring food, a blanket, or something to slow the cold.” Each gesture masquerades as mercy, each act tethered to the logic of the deal. It is governance through exhaustion.
But it is not merely the scene of interrogation. It is a relation in which massacre, negotiation, and measurement feed one another: the massacre produces the crisis that makes the negotiation legible; and the negotiation becomes the space in which the impact of violence is measured. Each Israeli bombing is followed not by silence, but by assessment: has the resistance softened? Has the community broken? Are they ready to concede?
Negotiation is not a deviation from violence; it is one of its modalities — strategic, affective, diagnostic. To speak of negotiation here is to speak of a calibration of ruin and the testing of spirit and fatigue. Just like the interrogator tests the limits of the prisoner’s endurance.
And still, within the dungeon, the Palestinian prisoner sometimes longs for the interrogator, because in a world of sealed doors and slow starvation, he becomes the only one who confirms that you still exist, the only sociality possible.
The irony is that the more weakness you show, the more they withhold. The more you comply, the tighter the screws become. That’s why it is not a negotiation of needs, but an architecture of humiliation calibrated to ensure that even your willingness to speak becomes a further mark of dispossession, or a moment to squeeze everything from the interlocutor and make sure he holds nothing back.
When analysts, diplomats, and commentators invoke the term “negotiations,” it is actually an interrogation, because its structure is designed to exhaust the other until they collapse. And when collapse does not suffice, elimination follows. In this paradigm, Israel does not seek interlocutors, but seeks the unraveling of those it summons to the table.
The way in which Israel has conducted the ceasefire negotiations, caught in a perpetual cycle of proposals, rejections, the resumption of hostilities, and the insistence on non-starters, is rather like the dynamic between the Israeli interrogators of the Shin Bet and the Palestinian prisoners enduring their pressure tactics.
In the rooms of the Shin Bet, the manipulation of time becomes a weapon, and language becomes a tool of disorientation. Truth is not revealed through clarity or dialogue but extracted through exhaustion: physical torture, psychological games, the pretense of friendship, and promises that are easily betrayed. The goal is not to understand the subject but to unmake it — not just confession, but collapse.
“If you speak, I’ll give you a cigarette. If you name a name, you can rest. If you give us one person — just one — we might bring food, a blanket, or something to slow the cold.” Each gesture masquerades as mercy, each act tethered to the logic of the deal. It is governance through exhaustion.
But it is not merely the scene of interrogation. It is a relation in which massacre, negotiation, and measurement feed one another: the massacre produces the crisis that makes the negotiation legible; and the negotiation becomes the space in which the impact of violence is measured. Each Israeli bombing is followed not by silence, but by assessment: has the resistance softened? Has the community broken? Are they ready to concede?
Negotiation is not a deviation from violence; it is one of its modalities — strategic, affective, diagnostic. To speak of negotiation here is to speak of a calibration of ruin and the testing of spirit and fatigue. Just like the interrogator tests the limits of the prisoner’s endurance.
And still, within the dungeon, the Palestinian prisoner sometimes longs for the interrogator, because in a world of sealed doors and slow starvation, he becomes the only one who confirms that you still exist, the only sociality possible.
The irony is that the more weakness you show, the more they withhold. The more you comply, the tighter the screws become. That’s why it is not a negotiation of needs, but an architecture of humiliation calibrated to ensure that even your willingness to speak becomes a further mark of dispossession, or a moment to squeeze everything from the interlocutor and make sure he holds nothing back.
When analysts, diplomats, and commentators invoke the term “negotiations,” it is actually an interrogation, because its structure is designed to exhaust the other until they collapse. And when collapse does not suffice, elimination follows. In this paradigm, Israel does not seek interlocutors, but seeks the unraveling of those it summons to the table.
Beyond the binary
If Israeli negotiation operates as a form of interrogation, then it is equally vital to remember that Palestinians have not only recognized this structure but have also repeatedly sabotaged its operation. Indeed, the history of the Palestinian struggle is the history of refusing the terms of legibility imposed by the occupier: of speaking without permission, refusing speech when compelled, of surviving without seeking recognition. This is not romantic defiance. It is clarity forged under pressure. A political cunning formed in the prison cell, the interrogation chamber, the ruined home, and the negotiating table alike.
Palestinians have long been expected to perform their defeat, embodying restraint while rehearsing moderation and denouncing violence selectively. Yet time and again, these roles are declined. The prisoner who chooses silence over confession; the hunger striker who displaces the temporality of domination by submitting his body to time itself; the mother who insists on naming her dead child not as a victim, but as a martyr; the camp that refuses to dissolve into the dust of humanitarianism—these are not just acts of resistance, but refusals of capture.
It is precisely this refusal that breaks open the false binary that Israel now offers the world: between extermination and containment — “Gideon’s Chariots” and the Egyptian plan.
They aren’t alternatives to one another, but rather structural co-conspirators. One would eliminate Palestinians as subjects through military sterilization, and the other would disarm and administer them through international bureaucracy. One is an open genocide, and the other is a managed disappearance.
This binary is itself becoming unstable, because the fractures are now running through the moral architecture of the international order, daily unmasked in its complicity and selective grief. They run through Israel’s own foundations: a stretched military, an incoherent political leadership, and a society fracturing under the weight of unending war and the anticipation of the return of the messiah. The fractures run through every site where the binary of extermination or containment is refused, and where a third, fugitive possibility begins to flicker.
This third path, though not easily named, is already being lived. It pulses through global solidarity networks that no longer ask for permission but demand accountability. It grows in every courtroom where the word genocide is uttered — not as a metaphor, but as a legal charge. It lives in the recognition that Palestine is not a humanitarian crisis to be managed, but a political cause to be reclaimed.
It lives in the knowledge that Palestine has hollowed out the claims of the liberal order, exposed its foundations, and saturated its vocabulary — and still insists on its presence.
Abdaljawad Omar
Abdaljawad Omar is a Palestinian scholar and theorist whose work focuses on the politics of resistance, decolonization, and the Palestinian struggle.
Exterminating Gaza was always Israel’s plan, but now it’s official
Israel carried out its plan to erase Gaza over the course of 18 months. Now that the plan has clearly fallen into place, the Netanyahu government is openly discussing ethnic cleansing. And still, Israel enjoys complete international impunity.
May 9, 2025
MONDOWEISS
Aerial view of the destruction in Rafah on January 19, 2025, during the start of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)
It has been a year since Israel first invaded Rafah and crossed Biden’s illusory “red line.” The Israeli army destroyed the Rafah crossing, isolating Gaza from Egypt and completely cutting it off from the outside world. Israel was free to conduct the mass displacement of Palestinians away from the Egyptian border, but it never admitted to that goal.
But now, Rafah is no more, and Israel’s recently approved plan to reoccupy Gaza indefinitely has made explicit what many have already expected for months: that the ulterior motive of creating permanent military installations and buffer zones in Gaza is to facilitate the mass expulsion of Palestinians.
Israel is now openly announcing its intentions and publicly advertising ethnic cleansing as “voluntary migration.” This didn’t happen overnight, but has been the result of a slow, deliberate process of hemming Palestinians into concentrated sub-ghettoes under fire while creating vast military buffer zones on swathes of flattened Gazan territory. The plan has been implemented in piecemeal over the past 18 months, but now those pieces are falling clearly into place.
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Just last week, Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel’s main war aim of “defeating its enemies” superseded the goal of releasing Israeli captives in Gaza, echoing previous statements from his Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, the so-called hardliner.
This isn’t a new development. It has been Israel’s plan all along, but the Israeli government has had to stagger its implementation over the course of a year and a half due to a series of internal and external constraints. Yet it continued to set the stage for ethnic cleansing every step of the way.
The watershed moment came in February during the short-lived ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, when U.S. President Trump articulated his shocking plan for the U.S. to “own” Gaza and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” while the people of Gaza would be relocated elsewhere. Suddenly, the President of the United States was endorsing a plan that Israel had never dared voice in public. Even a month earlier, Netanyahu had said in a televised statement that “Israel has no intention of permanently reoccupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population.”
This is the exact plan that the Israeli war cabinet has just approved.
Since Trump made his February statement, which he later walked back, Israel has been emboldened to go full steam ahead with its plan. The resumption of the war and the blowing up of the ceasefire are partly informed by this newfound determination to see through Israel’s “final solution” for the Gaza question. The reason it is able to do it is because the international community has barely lifted a finger to stop it.
But Trump’s February announcement was not where Israel’s strategy to take over the strip and displace its people originated. Well before Israel was forced by Trump to enter into the ceasefire with Hamas, the army had thrown all its force behind a military plan proposed by a cohort of Israeli generals based on an earlier vision laid out by retired Israeli general Giora Eiland. Dubbed “the Generals’ Plan,” its aim was to completely depopulate northern Gaza through siege and starvation. The implementation of the plan included completely sealing off the 400,000 Palestinians residing in the area and leaving them without food, water, or medicine; a non-stop wave of demolitions and detonations of residential buildings and houses; widespread carpet-bombing; and the direct, forcible evacuation of schools-turned-shelters and hospitals in the north.
By the time the ceasefire was reached on January 19, the population of north Gaza had been reduced to less than 100,000. The last functioning hospital in the area, Kamal Adwan Hospital, was also forcibly evacuated following an 80-day siege and several direct attacks by Israeli drones. Israeli forces also abducted several members of the medical staff, including the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who continues to be detained by Israeli forces to this day.
The Generals’ Plan failed after hundreds of thousands of Palestinians returned to the north in a historic return march during the ceasefire, setting up camp beside the rubble of their homes and sending a clear message that their displacement had been anything but “voluntary.”
Israel’s plans for realizing its solution to the “Gaza problem” had been frustrated, and it was dragged into the ceasefire kicking and screaming. Israel continued to stall at every stage of the ceasefire, sabotaging it at every opportunity and refusing to enter into negotiations that would see a permanent end to the war. It continued to bide its time, waiting for an opening. Trump gave Israel the opening it needed in February, and Netanyahu’s war cabinet has been barreling through all internal obstacles within the Israeli political system ever since.
How Israel started implementing its ‘voluntary migration’ plan
In March, the Israeli Defense Ministry approved the creation of a special bureau to promote the expulsion of Palestinians. At the time, the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was still in effect, albeit tenuously, as Israel refused to move to the second phase of the ceasefire talks, which would have involved negotiations over permanently ending the war. Five days after the ceasefire broke, U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was still saying that the idea of transferring Palestinians was “practical” and “realizable.”
Then, in early April, Israel revealed the carving out of a new militarized strip of land south of Khan Younis called the Morag Corridor, cutting off the southernmost Rafah governorate from the rest of Gaza. Everything south of Morag, including all of Rafah, was announced as part of a military buffer zone, reducing the surface of the Palestinian enclave by a fifth. This was made possible by Israel’s intensified bombing and demolition campaign of Rafah since the Israeli army invaded the governorate in May 2024, leveling all of the city’s infrastructure.
Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the aim of the Morag Corridor was to facilitate the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians, while Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, announced in a televised statement that the Israeli army was “cutting off” the continuity of the Gaza Strip and implementing the voluntary migration plan. Katz reiterated this plan weeks later, stating that Israel’s strategy in Gaza included destroying infrastructure, blocking the entry of humanitarian aid, and “promoting voluntary transfer.”
Who is responsible?
Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Israel has revealed parts of its final plan in stages. At the start of the genocide, then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was imposing a “total siege” on Gaza, preventing the entry of food, water, electricity, or fuel, and labeling Palestinians as “human animals.” The genocidal implications of the war’s endgame were apparent, but the unfolding of Israel’s plan in Gaza continued to be concealed politically by endless rhetoric about ceasefire talks, and even the release of Israeli captives. The Israeli government now makes no pretenses of the captives’ importance, after officially moving them to the bottom of the priority list of the war’s goals.
Every step of the way, Israel has met no practical consequences for its escalation, and no government with any leverage over Israel has moved to impose any political repercussions. Even the generalized official rejection by European and Arab governments of Trump’s Gaza plan wasn’t followed by any action. And of course, Israel’s refusal to move on to the second phase of the ceasefire and its constant violations of the truce were met with silence. That silence continues to be deafening as Israel carves the Morag Corridor, erases Rafah, and is now moving to do the same thing to other parts of Gaza.
Total impunity accompanied every one of Israel’s milestones in the march toward exterminating Gaza, from the hundreds of bombings of schools, hospitals, aid workers, paramedics, and journalists, to the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s population. Now, the permanency of Israel’s occupation of Gaza is official, and so is the stated aim of ethnically cleansing its people. And we still have no reaction.
The fact that the silence persists as Israel’s end goals have been made clear confirms that the extermination of Gaza was never the vision of the Israeli far-right, or even of Netanyahu personally; it was an international decision.
This must be the new realization that underlies any account of the destruction of Palestinian life, including the impending Israeli annexation of the West Bank and the full colonization of East Jerusalem, the Naqab, and any other part of historic Palestine where the Palestinian people still struggle to preserve their collective existence.
Qassam Muaddi
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter/X at @QassaMMuaddi.
Aerial view of the destruction in Rafah on January 19, 2025, during the start of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)It has been a year since Israel first invaded Rafah and crossed Biden’s illusory “red line.” The Israeli army destroyed the Rafah crossing, isolating Gaza from Egypt and completely cutting it off from the outside world. Israel was free to conduct the mass displacement of Palestinians away from the Egyptian border, but it never admitted to that goal.
But now, Rafah is no more, and Israel’s recently approved plan to reoccupy Gaza indefinitely has made explicit what many have already expected for months: that the ulterior motive of creating permanent military installations and buffer zones in Gaza is to facilitate the mass expulsion of Palestinians.
Israel is now openly announcing its intentions and publicly advertising ethnic cleansing as “voluntary migration.” This didn’t happen overnight, but has been the result of a slow, deliberate process of hemming Palestinians into concentrated sub-ghettoes under fire while creating vast military buffer zones on swathes of flattened Gazan territory. The plan has been implemented in piecemeal over the past 18 months, but now those pieces are falling clearly into place.
Advertisement
🗓️ Sign up for the Daily Headlines newsletter. You'll get new stories delivered directly to your inbox every morning at 8 a.m. EST.
Subscribe
Just last week, Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel’s main war aim of “defeating its enemies” superseded the goal of releasing Israeli captives in Gaza, echoing previous statements from his Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, the so-called hardliner.
This isn’t a new development. It has been Israel’s plan all along, but the Israeli government has had to stagger its implementation over the course of a year and a half due to a series of internal and external constraints. Yet it continued to set the stage for ethnic cleansing every step of the way.
The watershed moment came in February during the short-lived ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, when U.S. President Trump articulated his shocking plan for the U.S. to “own” Gaza and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” while the people of Gaza would be relocated elsewhere. Suddenly, the President of the United States was endorsing a plan that Israel had never dared voice in public. Even a month earlier, Netanyahu had said in a televised statement that “Israel has no intention of permanently reoccupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population.”
This is the exact plan that the Israeli war cabinet has just approved.
Since Trump made his February statement, which he later walked back, Israel has been emboldened to go full steam ahead with its plan. The resumption of the war and the blowing up of the ceasefire are partly informed by this newfound determination to see through Israel’s “final solution” for the Gaza question. The reason it is able to do it is because the international community has barely lifted a finger to stop it.
But Trump’s February announcement was not where Israel’s strategy to take over the strip and displace its people originated. Well before Israel was forced by Trump to enter into the ceasefire with Hamas, the army had thrown all its force behind a military plan proposed by a cohort of Israeli generals based on an earlier vision laid out by retired Israeli general Giora Eiland. Dubbed “the Generals’ Plan,” its aim was to completely depopulate northern Gaza through siege and starvation. The implementation of the plan included completely sealing off the 400,000 Palestinians residing in the area and leaving them without food, water, or medicine; a non-stop wave of demolitions and detonations of residential buildings and houses; widespread carpet-bombing; and the direct, forcible evacuation of schools-turned-shelters and hospitals in the north.
By the time the ceasefire was reached on January 19, the population of north Gaza had been reduced to less than 100,000. The last functioning hospital in the area, Kamal Adwan Hospital, was also forcibly evacuated following an 80-day siege and several direct attacks by Israeli drones. Israeli forces also abducted several members of the medical staff, including the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who continues to be detained by Israeli forces to this day.
The Generals’ Plan failed after hundreds of thousands of Palestinians returned to the north in a historic return march during the ceasefire, setting up camp beside the rubble of their homes and sending a clear message that their displacement had been anything but “voluntary.”
Israel’s plans for realizing its solution to the “Gaza problem” had been frustrated, and it was dragged into the ceasefire kicking and screaming. Israel continued to stall at every stage of the ceasefire, sabotaging it at every opportunity and refusing to enter into negotiations that would see a permanent end to the war. It continued to bide its time, waiting for an opening. Trump gave Israel the opening it needed in February, and Netanyahu’s war cabinet has been barreling through all internal obstacles within the Israeli political system ever since.
How Israel started implementing its ‘voluntary migration’ plan
In March, the Israeli Defense Ministry approved the creation of a special bureau to promote the expulsion of Palestinians. At the time, the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was still in effect, albeit tenuously, as Israel refused to move to the second phase of the ceasefire talks, which would have involved negotiations over permanently ending the war. Five days after the ceasefire broke, U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was still saying that the idea of transferring Palestinians was “practical” and “realizable.”
Then, in early April, Israel revealed the carving out of a new militarized strip of land south of Khan Younis called the Morag Corridor, cutting off the southernmost Rafah governorate from the rest of Gaza. Everything south of Morag, including all of Rafah, was announced as part of a military buffer zone, reducing the surface of the Palestinian enclave by a fifth. This was made possible by Israel’s intensified bombing and demolition campaign of Rafah since the Israeli army invaded the governorate in May 2024, leveling all of the city’s infrastructure.
Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the aim of the Morag Corridor was to facilitate the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians, while Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, announced in a televised statement that the Israeli army was “cutting off” the continuity of the Gaza Strip and implementing the voluntary migration plan. Katz reiterated this plan weeks later, stating that Israel’s strategy in Gaza included destroying infrastructure, blocking the entry of humanitarian aid, and “promoting voluntary transfer.”
Who is responsible?
Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Israel has revealed parts of its final plan in stages. At the start of the genocide, then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was imposing a “total siege” on Gaza, preventing the entry of food, water, electricity, or fuel, and labeling Palestinians as “human animals.” The genocidal implications of the war’s endgame were apparent, but the unfolding of Israel’s plan in Gaza continued to be concealed politically by endless rhetoric about ceasefire talks, and even the release of Israeli captives. The Israeli government now makes no pretenses of the captives’ importance, after officially moving them to the bottom of the priority list of the war’s goals.
Every step of the way, Israel has met no practical consequences for its escalation, and no government with any leverage over Israel has moved to impose any political repercussions. Even the generalized official rejection by European and Arab governments of Trump’s Gaza plan wasn’t followed by any action. And of course, Israel’s refusal to move on to the second phase of the ceasefire and its constant violations of the truce were met with silence. That silence continues to be deafening as Israel carves the Morag Corridor, erases Rafah, and is now moving to do the same thing to other parts of Gaza.
Total impunity accompanied every one of Israel’s milestones in the march toward exterminating Gaza, from the hundreds of bombings of schools, hospitals, aid workers, paramedics, and journalists, to the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s population. Now, the permanency of Israel’s occupation of Gaza is official, and so is the stated aim of ethnically cleansing its people. And we still have no reaction.
The fact that the silence persists as Israel’s end goals have been made clear confirms that the extermination of Gaza was never the vision of the Israeli far-right, or even of Netanyahu personally; it was an international decision.
This must be the new realization that underlies any account of the destruction of Palestinian life, including the impending Israeli annexation of the West Bank and the full colonization of East Jerusalem, the Naqab, and any other part of historic Palestine where the Palestinian people still struggle to preserve their collective existence.
Qassam Muaddi
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter/X at @QassaMMuaddi.
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