Mourners gather around the bodies of 8 Red Crescent emergency responders, recovered in Rafah a week after an Israeli attack, as they are transported for burial from a hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, March 31, 2025
The massacre of Red Crescent and civil defence aid workers has elicited little coverage and no condemnation by major powers — this is the age of lawlessness, warns JOE GILL
IT IS difficult to be shocked after 18 months of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza.
Brazen crimes against humanity have become the norm. World powers do nothing in response. At best, they put out weak statements of concern. Now the US does not even bother with that. It is fully on board with genocide.
Israel and the US are planning the violent ethnic cleansing of Gaza, knowing full well that no-one will stop them. The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court are sitting on their hands, despite what appeared to be significant rulings last year on Israeli war crimes by the ICC, and on the “plausible risk” of genocide by the ICJ.
As Israeli anti-zionist commentator Alon Mizrahi wrote this week:
“As Israel and the US announce and begin to enact plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, let’s remember that the International Court of Justice has not even convened to discuss the genocide since May 24 2024, when it was using very blurry language about the planned Rafah action. Tens of thousands have been exterminated since then, and hundreds of thousands have been injured. Babies starved and froze to death, and thousands of children lost limbs. Not a word from the ICJ.
“Zionism and US imperialism have rendered international law null and void. Everyone is allowed to do as they please to anyone. The post-World War II masquerade is truly over.”
Under the Joe Biden administration, secretary of state Antony Blinken and the smirking US spokesperson Matt Miller would make performative statements about “concern” over the killing of Palestinians (they would never use a word as clear as “killing,” always preferring the perpetrator-free “deaths”).
Today, under the Donald Trump regime, the mask of respect for the rituals of international diplomacy has been thrown aside. This is the law of the jungle, and the winner is the government that uses superior force to seize what they believe is theirs, and to silence and destroy those who stand in their way.
Palestinians forcibly displaced by israel’s assault on Gaza walk amid the rubble of the Jabalia refugee camp on January 19, 2025. (Photo: Omar Al-Qataa/AFP via Getty Images)
“There is nothing ‘voluntary’ about the program,” said one critic. “The population of Gaza is to be forced out of their ancestral homeland through deliberate mass starvation and mass killings.”
Israel’s Security Cabinet on Sunday approved the creation of new Defense Ministry directorate tasked with ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the Gaza Strip under the guise of “voluntary emigration.”
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz euphemistically called the new agency the “Voluntary Emigration Bureau for Gaza residents interested in relocating to third countries” and claimed it will operate in accordance with international law.
However, given Israel’s incessant flouting of international law—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice is hearing a genocide case against the country—critics excoriated Katz’s claim.
“In reality, there is nothing ‘voluntary’ about the program the Netanyahu government is implementing,” wroteWorld Socialist Web Site editor Andre Damon. “The population of Gaza is to be forced out of their ancestral homeland through deliberate mass starvation and mass killings by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).”
The Israeli cabinet has approved the establishment of an “administration for the voluntary transition of Gaza’s residents to third countries” – aka for mass ethnic cleansing
Katz also said the new directorate would be run “in accordance with the vision of U.S President Donald Trump,” who last month said that the United States would “take over” Gaza after emptying the strip of its approximately 2.1 million Palestinians and transform the coastal enclave into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
After doubling down on his proposal, Trump then attempted to gaslight the world by directly contradicting his previous remarks when he said earlier this month that “nobody is expelling any Palestinians” from Gaza. By then, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had declared that the so-called Trump Plan was “taking shape” in coordination with the U.S. administration.
However, leaders of Egypt and Jordan, where Trump has proposed sending Gazans, vehemently oppose the plan. A counterproposal issued by Egypt and other Arab nations—which involves rebuilding Gaza without forcibly displacing its residents—has the support of the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation and nations including China, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy.
The reconquest of Gaza is a longtime goal of Israel’s far-right, which, since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023 and subsequent obliteration of the strip, has moved to put its recolonization plans into action.
Israeli Col: Hamas is not the issue Gaza's people are'The population of Gaza are barbaric riffraff….the only solution is Trump's vision,' national security expert and colonel in the Israeli army's reserve force Gabi Siboni called for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza during a panel programme.
“October 7 changed history. As a result of the brutal massacre, the Gazan Arabs have lost their rights to be here forever, they’ll not stay here,” Daniella Weiss, co-founder of the extremist settler movement Nachala, said during an October 2024 conference on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza attended by Smotrich and numerous other Israeli lawmakers.
“Each of you will witness how Jews go to Gaza and Arabs will disappear from Gaza,” Weiss added.
The modern state of Israel was founded largely through the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians, sometimes accomplished via massacres and death marches. The majority of Gaza’s population today are survivors and descendants of Palestinians forced from their homeland to make way for Jewish immigrants in the post-World War II era.
Palestinians call the mass forced displacement of 1948 the Nakba, or catastrophe, and far-right Israelis today threaten to carry out a new Nakba to “finish the job,” as Smotrich and others have said.
Critics including Israeli troops have claimed that the IDF is carrying out the so-called “General’s Plan,” a blueprint for the starvation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from northern Gaza. Since October 2023, Israel has enforced what former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—who is also wanted by the ICC for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity—called a “complete siege” of Gaza, a blockade which has exacerbated deadly starvation and illness in the strip.
The ‘General’s Plan’ is being fully implemented in all of Gaza, not just the north. Israel is liquidating the ghetto with the full backing of Canada and the United States. This is what ethnic cleansing looks like under bombardment & starvation. pic.twitter.com/l0XxmU1RQB
On Sunday, the Gaza Health Ministry said the death toll from Israel’s 535-day assault on Gaza surpassed 50,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom are women and children. This, as Israeli forces have renewed their ferocious bombardment and invasion of the strip, killing hundreds of Palestinians including nearly 200 children, and wiping out entire families.
The ministry said that more than 113,000 others have been wounded since October 2023, and at least 14,000 more Palestinians are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings.
However, experts—including the authors of two peer-reviewed articles in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet—say the actual death toll is likely much higher.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Pro-Palestinian protesters march from Whitehall to the US embassy in Nine Elms, on 15 February 2025, in London, England [Richard Baker/In Pictures via Getty Images]
The US and Israel have contacted officials of three East African countries to discuss using their territories to settle Palestinians who have been forcibly displaced from Gaza, the Associated Press reported today according to Reuters
US and Israeli sources cited by AP said officials from Sudan, Somalia and the breakaway region of Somaliland were contacted regarding the proposal.
However, Sudan officials said they rejected the proposal from the US and officials from Somalia and Somaliland said they were unaware of any contacts, reported AP.
The White House and the US State Department did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. The information ministers for Somalia and its breakaway region of Somaliland did not pick up Reuters’ telephone calls for comment.
Earlier this month, Arab leaders adopted a $53 billion Egyptian reconstruction plan for Gaza that would avoid displacing Palestinians from the enclave, in contrast to US President Donald Trump’s vision of a “Middle East Riviera“.
Trump has proposed a US takeover of Gaza, where Israel’s military assault in the last 17 months has killed nearly 50,000 Palestinians, to reconstruct the destroyed enclave, after earlier suggesting that Palestinians should be permanently displaced.
Trump’s plan reinforced long-standing Palestinian fears of being permanently driven from their homes, and was met with widespread international rejection and warnings that it amounted to ethnic cleansing.
Israel continues to ban the entry of building materials and diggers into the besieged enclave, leaving the over 2.3 million Palestinians in the Strip to live among the ruins.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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PALESTINE activists painted “Gaza is not for sale” on the lawn at Donald Trump’s Scottish golf course at the weekend in response to the US president’s dismissive comments about the war-torn strip.
Palestine Action members dug up greens and spray-painted the lawn and clubhouse at the 800-acre south Ayrshire resort early on Saturday.
The activist group said that it was responding to the US administration’s plans and threats to ethnically cleanse and take over the Gaza Strip, where more than 48,000 Palestinians, 80 per cent of them civilians, have been killed by Israeli forces during the war.
A spokesperson said: “Palestine Action rejects Donald Trump’s treatment of Gaza as though it were his property to dispose of as he likes.
“To make that clear, we have shown him that his own property is not safe from acts of resistance. We will continue to take action against US-Israeli colonialism in the Palestinian homeland.”
An AI-generated video posted on social media on February 25, 2025 by U.S. President Donald Trump showed the president with Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza following Israel’s U.S.-backed decimation of the enclave. (Photo: screenshot/Truth Social)
“Monsters rejoicing in their genocide” was how one observer described the computer-generated video
Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk feasting on local cuisine, U.S. President Donald Trump caressing the arm of a belly dancer in a nightclub, and the Israeli prime minister lounging by a pool are all part of the computer-generated vision Trump shared on his social media platform Tuesday evening for the future of Gaza following Israel’s destruction of the enclave.
Accompanied by an upbeat song heralding “Trump Gaza, shining bright, golden future, a brand new life,” the “sinister” artificial intelligence-made video “must be seen to be believed,” said British trade unionist Howard Beckett.
“Monsters rejoicing in their genocide and ethnic cleansing,” he said, summarizing the 34-second video. “It is truly racist fascism.”
This was just posted on President Trump’s Truth Social account.
The video was posted amid the fragile cease-fire that’s been in place since mid-January in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians since it began bombarding the enclave in October 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack.
As negotiators have worked toward a permanent cease-fire in recent weeks, Trump has floated a proposal to turn Gaza—home to 2 million people—into a playground for the rich called the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Advocates and experts warned earlier this month that Trump’s proposal to “clean out” Palestinians as part of his latest real estate venture was an explicit call for ethnic cleansing—one that, according to the video Trump posted on Truth Social, includes the construction of a property called “Trump Gaza” and an immense statue depicting the president.
Toward the end of the video Musk, who poured $277 million into Trump’s presidential campaign and has grown richer since Trump took office, is shown again walking through a crowd as money rains down around him.
Palestinian American historian Ussama Makdisi called the video depicting the U.S. colonization of Gaza “sick,” but suggested it showed an extreme outcome of the American political establishment’s view and treatment of Palestinian rights for decades, including its support for Israel’s assault on the enclave.
“What else should we expect from the culmination of a bipartisan U.S. consensus that for a century has waged war on the idea that Palestinians deserve equality and freedom?” said Makdisi.
Ben Goggin, deputy technology editor for NBC News, noted that “nearly all” of the comments posted in response to the video on Trump’s own platform were negative, with self-identified supporters calling it “just plain horrible” and “filth.”
The comments under Trump’s AI generated Gaza video posted to his own platform are nearly all critical…
The origin of the video was not clear on Wednesday; Trump shared it without commenting on who made it.
International human rights experts and a United Nations committee have said there is evidence that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and this week Democracy for the Arab World Now called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate former U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration for “aiding and abetting” alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The ICC has also issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif for alleged war crimes. Deif was killed in an Israeli airstrike last year.
Trump’s video, said British-Nigerian activist and author Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, envisions “ethnic cleansing rebranded as a real estate deal.”
“Colonialist white supremacist zionism,” she said, describing the video. “Pure evil.”
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