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benjamin netanyahu
Israeli Security Cabinet Approves Plan for 'Mass Ethnic Cleansing' of Gaza
"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."
Mar 24, 2025
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
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— Hanno Hauenstein (@hahauenstein.bsky.social) March 23, 2025 at 2:55 AM
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.
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— Middle East Monitor (@middleeastmonitor.bsky.social) March 24, 2025 at 8:31 AM
"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.
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.
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Never Again—Not in Our Name
I was taught to believe L’chaim referred to the value of all human life. If so, for the toast to be more than an empty gesture we must recognize the plight of the Palestinians since the creation of the State of Israel.
Mar 21, 2025
The most important way to confront antisemitism and to respect the memory of the Holocaust is to speak the truth. We saw the truth of genocide in action when the Israelis killed more than 400 people and injured even more on a single night when they resumed bombing Gaza. These casualties joined the tens of thousands killed and those surviving without limbs, whose bodies and minds have been burned and broken, whose children have died or have been orphaned.
According to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), in an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro in The New York Times, those charging Israel with genocide are antisemitic. “And it is vicious of the opponents to call this genocide. Criticize it? For sure. Say Israel went too far? For sure. And you know what it does? It increases antisemitism, because they’re making Israel and the Jewish people look like monsters, which they are not.”
As I write this, doctors in Gaza are tending to shrapnel wounds penetrating the bodies and brains of children fighting for their lives in the face of genocide.
How could anyone viewing the devastation and the children’s bodies wrapped in shrouds as the result of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most recent political games think of those responsible for this carnage are anything but monsters? Of course, those who committed atrocities on October 7 are monsters too. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are responsible for tens of thousands more deaths and by numerous estimates more than 100,000 casualties.
The latest wave of destruction and slaughter during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan was a particularly vicious way to end the cease-fire. Netanyahu and the Israeli leadership and large swaths of Israelis and Americans place as little value on Palestinian lives as the Nazis did regarding Jews. I’m not making false comparisons, but rather I am referring to what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the Banality of Evil. The darkening of hearts that enabled the acceptance of the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust is at work in the commission of genocide in Gaza today.
“Hear o Israel the Lord our God the Lord is One” —the Shema is the most essential Jewish prayer. The 10 Commandments given by God are supposed to be the central ethical and moral tenants of Jewish life. How then can Jews massacre Palestinians when the commandment says, “Thou shall not murder?”
Consider the future of young Israelis in the military who are conditioned to see every Palestinian as an enemy whose life is worth pennies on the dollar. What will happen to those involved in war crimes and brutal injustices? Will their moral compasses ever reset? Will their hearts drown in tears or will they remain steadfast and pass on cruelty to the next generation?
Hold up a cup and say, “L’chaim,”—the Jewish toast to life. I was taught to believe L’chaim referred to the value of all human life. If so, for the toast to be more than an empty gesture we must recognize the plight of the Palestinians since the creation of the State of Israel.
The toast, which has been said for more than 2,000 years, is meant to be a celebration of humanity. We affirm the joy of living while feeling the weight of history. L’chaim must be said with conviction and passion. We toast the lives of you who have survived; we pray that someday your children and grandchildren can live as friends with our own.
As I write this, doctors in Gaza are tending to shrapnel wounds penetrating the bodies and brains of children fighting for their lives in the face of genocide.
Never Again was said after the Holocaust—Not in Our Name is what Jews opposed to genocide are shouting today.
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International Legal Coalition Launched to 'Pursue Israeli War Crimes Suspects'
"Under international law, states have a duty to investigate and prosecute war crimes, yet these obligations have been systematically neglected," one of the initiative's founders lamented.
Mar 19, 2025
Lawyers from half a dozen countries on Tuesday launched a coalition dedicated to bringing Israelis and dual nationals accused of war crimes in Palestine to justice.
The U.K.-based International Center of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) hosted a launch event in London for the new initiative, called Global 195. ICJP said lawyers will "pursue Israeli war crimes suspects across the world" via arrest warrant applications and the initiation of legal proceedings including private prosecutions against implicated members and veterans of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), as well as "figures spanning the entire Israeli military and political chain of command, from senior policymakers to operational personnel, who are directly or indirectly responsible for violations of international law."
Participants include attorneys from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Malaysia, Norway, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, where "advanced preparations have already been made to pursue legal action against British citizens suspected of joining the IDF or committing war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank."
For the past 18 months, ICJP has been collecting evidence as part of its Justice for Gaza campaign, including 135 eyewitness testimonies backed by open-source intelligence. Documented violations of international law include indiscriminate and disproportionate bombing of civilians, attacks on designated "safe zones,"s airstrikes targeting refugee camps, use of starvation as a weapon of war, and forced displacement.
"The obstruction of international legal institutions in pursuing individuals responsible for war crimes in Palestine, coupled with the failure of national police forces to fulfill their obligations under humanitarian law and universal jurisdiction principles, has allowed impunity for Israeli suspected war criminals to persist," ICJP director Tayab Ali said in a statement.
"Under international law, states have a duty to investigate and prosecute war crimes, yet these obligations have been systematically neglected," Ali added. "The launch of Global 195 is a necessary legal intervention to remedy this failure. By activating domestic legal mechanisms across multiple jurisdictions, we are ensuring that those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza are subject to legal accountability and no longer have anywhere to hide."
Huseyin Disli, vice president of the Worldwide Lawyers Association, noted that "no domestic court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli genocide war criminals, exposing the failure of the international legal order" and called the global legal community "incoherent in its goals."
Israel is currently the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case filed by South Africa, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, which last November issued arrest warrants over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. However, key nations including the United States—which has not ratified the Rome Statute upon which the ICC is based—have ignored the warrants, and last month the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the tribunal.
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 175,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. On Tuesday, Israel unilaterally abandoned an eight-week cease-fire and resumed its assault on Gaza, killing more than 400 people including at least 174 children in airstrikes that wiped out entire families.
United Nations experts, international jurists, human rights groups, and others have found that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, as well as crimes including indiscriminate and disproportionate killing of civilians, extrajudicial killing, torture, sexual violence including rape, use of starvation as a weapon of war, and forced displacement.
The launch of Global 195 follows the establishment last September of the
Hind Rajab Foundation, a Belgium-based legal group that pursues arrest warrants for alleged Israeli war criminals traveling abroad. The organization is named after a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed—along with six relatives—by Israeli forces in January 2024 while trying to flee to safety in a car. Two paramedics who tried to rescue her were also killed.
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