All pieces point to Israel’s goal of pushing Palestinians away from Gaza’
Adnan Hayajneh, a professor of international relations and US foreign policy at Qatar University, says Israel is trying to buy time as it works to implement a wider vision of forcing the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip.
“The whole objective of Israel [is] to move the Palestinians, to push them away from Gaza,” he told Al Jazeera.
“If you put all the pieces together, from talking about the humanitarian centres and pushing the people to Rafah, that means it’s an implementation of a vision of Netanyahu … and he wants to have military control over Gaza – he’s not interested in withdrawing.”
Hayajneh said the attempt to buy time is tied to the potential ceasefire and the proposal of moving forcibly starved Palestinians to Rafah “within a concentration camp” and giving them the option of either staying “in a big prison” or leaving.
“There were some suggestions before even the creation of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a vision that we have to have a Gaza without people – and this vision is shared by Trump, by Witkoff, by Netanyahu, by the minister of defence in Israel,” he added.
“There is no choice when you put people in a prison and ask them to leave,” Hayajneh continued. “This is outrageous, this is unlawful, this is against international law, but unfortunately, nobody is daring to speak against that.”
They said it from the start, Oct 30 2023
https://www.972mag.com/intelligence-ministry-gaza-population-transfer/
‘Big deal’: Israel wants to build ‘concentration camp’ for Palestinians in southern Gaza
Ori Goldberg, Israeli political commentator, says “it is a big deal” for Israel to talk about its plan of setting up “what is for all facts and purposes a concentration camp” for Palestinians in southern Gaza, committing “what is an overt crime against humanity under international humanitarian law”.
“It should be taken very seriously,” he added, but questioned the feasibility of the task of “concentrating the Palestinian population in a locked city where they would be let in but not let out.”
Goldberg said that leading sources within the Israeli army have directly said they cannot build the camp while working “towards the release of hostages, which is codename for continuing to bomb and kill Palestinians all over Gaza”.
The army lacks the resources for “the immense logistical enterprise”, he added. “The Israeli economy is in tatters, the IDF [the Israeli army] is paying millions of shekels for people to demolish Gaza’s structures, not build them.”
‘A second Nakba?’: UN’s Lazzarini slams Israel’s planned concentration camps
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), has warned against the latest mass forced displacement plan by Israel to cram people into camps on the ruins of Rafah.
“This would de-facto create massive concentration camps at the border with Egypt for the Palestinians, displaced over and over across generations,” he said in a post under the title, “A second Nakba?”
“This would also deprive Palestinians of any prospects of a better future in their homeland.”
Lazzarini said people cannot remain “silent and complicit of such large-scale forced displacement” and renewed his call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Nakba, or catastrophe, refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.
