The Gamliel Plan

On October 7, 2023, fighters from Hamas invaded Israel and killed around 400 soldiers and around 800 civilians. They raped, injured and kidnapped hundreds of others.

By October 13, the Intelligence Ministry of Israel had produced a plan for how to deal with these attacks. Led by the Likud Party member Gila Gamliel, the document described how to evacuate all Palestinians  into the Sinai desert, permanently depopulating the Gaza Strip and opening it up to Israeli settlement.

Gamliel repeated the plan in an op-ed for the Jerusalem Post.  Further proposals followed.  Different wings of the Netanyahu coalition have supported similar plans. In January, a plan was floated to send Palestinians to the Congo.

This is a classic case of ethnic cleansing — removing the “wrong” people from the land they live on so that the “right” people can move in. It is a crime against humanity. The term “voluntary migration” is used, as if people who have been bombed, starved, and driven from place to place in Gaza could make reasonable choices about leaving.

The Gamliel plan is not the official policy of the Israeli government. However, much of the effects of the last 4 months have lined up with the plan: making Gaza unliveable, destroying civil infrastructure, continuously evacuating Palestinians farther and farther south, towards the Egyptian border, and disallowing return to the North.

Today, about 1.9M of Gaza’s 2.3M Palestinians are crammed into Rafah, a town at the Egyptian border. Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a ceasefire proposal, saying that victory was near. The Israeli military has declared its plan to attack Rafah, including plans for an evacuation. Egypt has refused repeatedly to allow a mass deportation into the Sinai.

I am hopeful that “evacuations” might mean return to Gaza, Khan Younis, and other towns and villages north of Rafah. But I am also afraid that we are heading into an ugly endgame, where thousands of displaced people will be brutalized until the Egyptian government and Western nations agree to help with “voluntary” evacuations into the Sinai and elsewhere.

I hope that the US and other Western countries have enough sway in Israel to counter the more extreme factions in the Netanyahu coalition who want a Gaza Strip empty of Palestinians.