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Israeli army enters the city with tanks for the first time since 2002 following after the ceasefire and prisoner and hostages swap agreement in Gaza entered into force in Jenin, West Bank on February 23, 2025 [Nedal Eshtayah – Anadolu Agency]
Calls to displace Palestinians from Gaza are already being translated into action in the occupied West Bank, where the occupation army has forced tens of thousands of Palestinians to leave their homes, Haaretz reported today.
The Hebrew edition of the newspaper referred to the statements of the Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, who proudly announced yesterday the goal of the operation that the army is waging in the occupied West Bank: the expulsion of the residents of the refugee camps.
The newspaper added that in the context of the Gaza Strip, they dream of transfer, but in the West Bank they are actually implementing it.
The minister added that “it is assumed that the 40,000 Palestinians who have already been expelled from the refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams will not be allowed to return there for at least a year.”
The newspaper said: “Katz’s statements completely contradict the official claim of the Israeli army since the beginning of the operation in the West Bank, which is that it is not evacuating the residents of the West Bank.”
According to the newspaper, “the residents of the refugee camps who were evacuated from their homes are taking refuge in the villages and towns in the area.”
Dozens of them sleep on the floors of temporary shelters run by local volunteers, while tens of thousands of them were forced to evacuate their homes quickly, without enough clothes, medicine or money. Children have not been to school for weeks.
It added that “the army is demolishing homes in refugee camps to widen roads, and has decided to tighten the atmosphere even more, as the army has brought its tanks into the Jenin refugee camp – for the first time in 20 years.”
The newspaper considered that “the army’s practices in the West Bank are the fruits of a campaign led by the settler leadership that has been pushing in these directions for more than a year, as the settlers have succeeded in turning the West Bank into a war zone in every sense of the word.”
Palestinians have reported being forced out of their homes by Israeli occupation forces, while others were used as human shields, then ordered to leave the refugee camp. One elderly blind man recounted how the army took over a building, brought him inside and locked him in a room with another family for two days without being able to communicate with anyone.
The newspaper stressed that
the rapid escalation in recent weeks – is compensation for the Israeli far-right for the disappointment and grief caused by the prisoner exchange deal.
The newspaper said that “Israel, as usual, instead of solving the root problems of the conflict, is proving that it only understands force, and that it is only capable of short-term thinking.”
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UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWREGenocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
A view of Ofer Prison located between Ramallah and Jerusalem as preparations for the release of Palestinian prisoners continue, on January 30, 2025. [Issam Rimawi – Anadolu Agency]
The Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) renewed its demand that international human rights organisations take effective decisions to hold Israeli occupation officials accountable for committing crimes against Palestinian prisoners who are subject to systematic torture in Israeli prisons, the Palestinian Information Centre reported.
The PPS said in a statement today that Israeli practices of repression against prisoners have escalated significantly recently in Ofer Prison, as an extension of the policy of repression and raids, which reached its peak during the genocidal war on Gaza.
The PPS revealed testimonies from prisoners which were obtained by their lawyers, specifically regarding the attack on prisoners on the evening of 16 February when the Israeli Metzada prison forces stormed several sections in Ofer Prison, using police dogs and stun grenades to intimidate detainees. They assaulted the prisoners, injuring dozens of them.
The PPS indicated that the Israeli prison administration uses the cold weather to torture the prisoners, by refusing to allow the entry of adequate clothes and appropriate covers.
prisoner D.P. said: “The repression that is carried out in prisoners’ rooms has lately escalated. The last attack took place last Saturday, when jailers assaulted prisoners, beating them and wreaking havoc on the contents of their rooms.” He added that such attacks happen every two to three days.
In another testimony, prisoner G.M., who suffers from an injury, said the Metzada unit assaulted him and broke his walker, which he uses to get to the medical clinic.
A number of injured detainees told their lawyers that they were suffering from constant pain due to the lack of treatment, in light of the policy of medical neglect and the severe cold.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
Israeli tanks gather outside of the occupied West Bank near Jenin, Sunday, Feb. 23, 2025
ISRAEL’S defence minister said today troops would remain “for the coming year” in parts of the occupied West Bank.
This follows complaints by Hamas over the decision by Tel Aviv to halt the release of detainees promised under the ceasefire deal.
The Israelis have deepened their crackdown on the Palestinian territory since launching their military offensive on the northern West Bank on January 21 — two days after the ceasefire that paused the war in Gaza took hold. They then expanded it to include other nearby areas.
Israel says it is determined to stamp out resistance in the territory, but Palestinians view such raids as part of an effort to cement Israeli control over the territory, where three million Palestinians live under military rule.
The deadly raids have devastated urban areas and displaced tens of thousands.
News outlets often preferred euphemisms like “displacing” or “resettling” to the more accurate “ethnic cleansing, as in this CBC headline (2/4/25).
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump said that the US will “take over the Gaza Strip” and “own” it for the “long-term” (AP, 2/5/25), and that its Palestinian inhabitants will be “permanently” exiled (AP, 2/4/25). Subsequently, when reporters asked Trump whether Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza under his plan, he said “no” (BBC, 2/10/25).
After Trump’s remarks, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (Reuters, 2/5/25) said “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing.”
Navi Pillay (Politico, 2/9/25), chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said that
Trump is woefully ignorant of international law and the law of occupation. Forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing.
Human Rights Watch (2/5/25) said that, if Trump’s plan were implemented, it would “amount to an alarming escalation of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.”
Clarity in the minority
Amnesty International (2/5/25) called Trump’s proposal to forcibly transfer the population of Gaza a flagrant violation of international law”—but the phrase “international law” was usually missing from news reports on the plan.
I used the news media aggregator Factiva to survey coverage of Trump’s remarks from the day that he first made them, February 4 through February 12. In that period, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post combined to run 145 pieces with the words “Gaza” and “Trump.” Of these, 19 contained the term “ethnic cleansing” or a variation on the phrase. In other words, 87% of the articles these outlets published on Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza chose not to call it ethnic cleansing.
A handful of other pieces used language that captures the wanton criminality of Trump’s scheme reasonably well. Three articles used “forced displacement,” or slight deviations from the word, while five others used “expel” and another nine used “expulsion.” Two of the articles said “forced transfer,” or a minor variation of that. In total, therefore, 38 of the 145 articles (26 percent) employ “ethnic cleansing” or the above-mentioned terms to communicate to readers that Trump wants to make Palestinians leave their homes so that the US can take Gaza from them.
Furthermore, the term “international law” appears in only 27 of the 145 articles, which means that 81% failed to point out to readers that what Trump is proposing is a “flagrant violation of international law” (Amnesty International, 2/5/25).
A ‘plan to free Palestinians’
A Wall Street Journal op-ed (2/5/25) hailed “Trump’s Plan to Free Palestinians From Gaza”—in the same sense that the Trail of Tears “freed” the Cherokee from Georgia.
Several commentators in the corporate media endorsed Trump’s racist fever dream, in some cases through circumlocutions and others quite bluntly. Elliot Kaufman (Wall Street Journal, 2/5/25) called Trump’s imperial hallucination a “plan to free Palestinians from Gaza.”
While the Journal’s editorial board (2/5/25) called what Trump wants to do “preposterous,” the authors nonetheless put “ethnic cleansing” in scare quotes, as if that’s not an apt description. The paper asked, “Is his idea so much worse than the status quo that the rest of the world is offering?”
Sadanand Dhume (Wall StreetJournal, 2/12/25) wondered why “If Indians and Pakistanis Can Relocate, Why Can’t Gazans?” To bolster his case, Dhume noted that 2 million people died as a result of the India-Pakistan partition, and cited other shining moments in 20th century history, such as Uganda’s expulsion of Indians in the 1970s. That these authors implicitly or explicitly advocate Trump’s plan for mass, racist violence demonstrates that they see Palestinians as subhuman impediments to US/Israeli designs on Palestine and the region.
Bret Stephens (New York Times, 2/11/25) wrote that
Trump also warned Jordan and Egypt that he would cut off American aid if they refused to accept Gazan refugees, adding that those refugees may not have the right to return to Gaza. The president’s threats are long overdue.
Ethnically cleansing the West Bank
Al Jazeera (2/26/24): “Settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory.”
A similar pattern exists in coverage of the West Bank, where evidence of ethnic cleansing is hard to miss, but corporate media appears to be finding ways to do just that.
Legal scholars Alice Panepinto and Triestino Mariniello wrote an article for Al Jazeera (2/26/24) headlined “Settler Violence: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Plan for the West Bank”:
Supported by the Israeli security forces and aided and abetted by the government, settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory in order to establish full sovereignty over it and enable settlement expansion.
The authors noted that, at the time they wrote their article, 16 Palesti nian communities in the West Bank had been forcibly transferred since October 7, 2023.
In October 2024, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese found that throughout the Gaza genocide, “Israeli forces and violent settlers” have “escalated patterns of ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” In the first 12 months after October 7, Albanese reported, “at least 18 communities were depopulated under the threat of lethal force, effectively enabling the colonization of large tracts” of the West Bank.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (2/10/25) said that Israel’s “latest ethnic cleansing efforts” entail “forcibly uproot[ing] thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank,” accompanied by
the bombing and burning of residential buildings and infrastructure, the cutting off of water, electricity and communications supplies, and a killing policy that has resulted in the deaths of 30 Palestinians…over the course of 19 days.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (2/10/25), Israeli military operations in Jenin camp, which expanded to Tulkarm, Nur Shams and El Far’a, displaced 40,000 Palestinian refugees between January 21 and February 10.
Unnoteworthy violations
I used Factiva to search New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage and found that, since Panepinto and Mariniello’s analysis was published just under a year ago, the three newspapers have combined to run 693 articles that mention the West Bank. Thirteen of these include some form of the term “ethnic cleansing,” a mere 2%. Nine more articles use “forced displacement,” or a variation on the phrase, 31 use “expel,” 11 use “expulsion” and five use some variety of “forced transfer.”
Thus, 69 of the 693 Times, Journal and Post articles that mention the West Bank use these terms to clearly describe people being violently driven from their homes—just 10%. Many of the articles that address the West Bank are also about Gaza, so the 69 articles using this language don’t necessarily apply it to the West Bank.
Of the 693 Times, Journal and Post pieces that refer to the West Bank, 106 include the term “international law.” Evidently, the authors and editors who worked on 85% of the papers’ articles that discuss the West Bank did not consider it noteworthy that Israel is engaged in egregious violations of international law in the territory.
‘Battling local militants’
The Washington Post (2/2/25) captioned this image of IDF bombing with Israel’s claim that it was “destroying buildings used by Palestinian militants.”
Rather than equip readers to understand the larger picture in which events in the West Bank unfold, much of the coverage treats incidents in the territory discretely. For instance, the Wall Street Journal (1/22/25) published a report on Israel’s late January attacks on the West Bank. In the piece’s 18th paragraph, it cited the Palestinian Authority saying the Israeli operations “displaced families and destroyed civilian properties.” In the 24th paragraph, the article also quoted UNRWA director Roland Friedrich, saying that Jenin had become “nearly uninhabitable,” and that “some 2,000 families have been displaced from the area since mid-December.” Palestinians being driven from their homes are an afterthought for the article’s authors, who do nothing to put this forced displacement in the longer-term context of Israel’s US-backed ethnic cleansing.
A Washington Post report (2/2/25) on Jenin says in its first paragraph that the fighting is occurring “where [Israeli] troops have been battling local militants.” The article then describes Palestinian “homes turned to ash and rubble, cars destroyed and small fires still burning amid the debris.” It cited the Palestinian Health Ministry noting that “at least five people were killed in Israeli strikes in the Jenin area, including a 16-year-old.”
Establishing a “troops vs. militants” frame at the outset of the article suggested that that is the lens through which the death and destruction in Jenin should be understood, rather than one in which a racist colonial enterprise is seeking to ethnically cleanse the Indigenous population resisting the initiative.
The rights of ‘neighbors’
This New York Times piece (2/4/25) acknowledges that Israeli settlements have “steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians”—but doesn’t call this process ethnic cleansing.
The New York Times (2/4/25) published an article on Republican bills that would require US government documents to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the name that expansionist Zionists prefer. The report discusses how Trump’s return to office “has emboldened supporters of Israeli annexation of the occupied territory.”
The piece notes that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have “settled” the West Bank since Israel occupied it in 1967, and that Palestinians living there have fewer rights than their Israeli “neighbors.” The author points out that “the growing number and size of the settlements have steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians.”
Yet the article somehow fails to mention a crucial part of this dynamic, namely Israel violently displacing Palestinians from their West Bank homes. Leaving out that vital information fails means that readers are not a comprehensive account of the ethnic cleansing backdrop against which the Republican bills are playing out.
Recent coverage of Gaza and the West Bank illustrates that, while corporate media occasionally outright call for expelling Palestinians from their land, more often the way these outlets support ethnic cleansing is by declining to call it ethnic cleansing.
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Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu participate in a joint statement in the East Room of the White House on January 28, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)
Let’s be clear: The forced displacement of Palestinians is not a new idea. U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest proposal to take “long-term ownership” of Gaza, to “clean out” the “mess,” and to turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East” is just the latest iteration of efforts aimed at ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their homeland.
What makes Trump’s comments dangerous is not the immediate threat of U.S. military intervention in Gaza followed by the expulsion of its 2.2 million residents. The real danger lies elsewhere.
First, Israel may interpret Trump’s words as a green light to push Palestinians out of Gaza or the West Bank. Second, the U.S. could tacitly endorse another Israeli offensive under the guise of fulfilling the president’s wishes. Third, Trump’s remarks suggest his foreign policy on Palestine will remain largely unchanged from his predecessor’s.
Trump’s so-called “humanitarian” ethnic cleansing proposal will similarly go down in history as another failed attempt, particularly as Arab and international solidarity with the steadfast Palestinian people is stronger than it has been in years.
Some Democrats have seized this moment to criticize Arab and Palestinian Americans who voted for Trump or abstained from supporting Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in the last elections. However, the idea of ethnic cleansing was already being floated during the Biden administration.
While then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated that “Palestinian civilians… must not be pressed to leave Gaza,” former President Joe Biden created the conditions for displacement through unconditional military support for Israel. This allowed one of the most devastating wars in modern Middle Eastern history to unfold.
Just days into the war, on October 13, 2023, Jordan’s King Abdullah II warned Blinken in Amman against any Israeli attempt to “forcibly displace Palestinians from all Palestinian territories or cause their internal displacement.”
The latter displacement became a reality as most of northern Gaza’s population was crammed into overcrowded refugee encampments in central and southern Gaza, where conditions have been and remain inhumane for over 16 months.
At the same time, another displacement campaign is underway in the West Bank, particularly in its northern regions, accelerating in recent weeks. Thousands of Palestinian families have already been displaced in the Jenin governorate and other areas.
Despite this, the Biden administration has done little to pressure Israel to stop.
Arab concerns over Palestinian expulsion were real from the war’s outset. Almost every Arab leader raised the alarm, often repeatedly.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi addressed the issue multiple times, warning of Israeli efforts—and possibly U.S. involvement—in a “population transfer” scheme.
“What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to seek refuge and migrate to Egypt,” Sisi stated, insisting that such an outcome “should not be accepted.”
Fifteen months later, under Trump, he repeated his rejection, vowing that Egypt would not participate in this “act of injustice.”
The Saudi statement was issued almost immediately after Trump doubled down on the idea during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 4. The Saudi foreign ministry went further than rejecting Trump’s “ownership” of Gaza but articulated a political discourse that summarized Riyad’s, in fact, the Arab League’s position on Palestine.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs affirms that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s position on the establishment of a Palestinian state is firm and unwavering,” the statement said, adding that the Kingdom “also reaffirms its unequivocal rejection of any infringement on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, whether through Israeli settlement policies, land annexation, or attempts to displace the Palestinian people from their land.”
The new U.S. administration, however, seems oblivious to Palestinian history. Given the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948, no Arab government—let alone the Palestinian leadership—would support another Israeli-U.S. effort to ethnically cleanse millions into neighboring states.
Beyond the immorality of expelling an Indigenous population, history has shown that such actions destabilize the region for generations. The 1948 Nakba, which saw the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, ignited the Arab-Israeli conflict, whose repercussions continue today.
History also teaches us that the Nakba was not an isolated event. Israel has repeatedly attempted ethnic cleansing, starting with its intense attacks on Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza in the early 1950s, and ever since.
The 1967 war, known as the Nakba or “Setback,” led to the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, both internally and externally. In the years that followed, various U.S.-Israeli initiatives throughout the 1970s sought to relocate the Palestinian population to the Sinai desert. However, these efforts failed due to the steadfastness and collective resistance of the people of Gaza.
Trump’s so-called “humanitarian” ethnic cleansing proposal will similarly go down in history as another failed attempt, particularly as Arab and international solidarity with the steadfast Palestinian people is stronger than it has been in years.
The key question now is whether Arabs and other supporters of Palestine worldwide will go beyond merely rejecting such sinister proposals and take the initiative to push for the restoration of the Palestinian homeland. This requires a justice-based international campaign, rooted in international law and driven by the aspirations of the Palestinian people themselves.
Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
