Israel facilitates emigration of Palestinians

“Uninhabitable,” Martin Griffiths, the United Nations’ top emergency relief official, has called the enclave after three months of Israel’s war with Hamas, saying its people were “witnessing daily threats to their very existence.”

Israel’s war on Gaza since October 7 has made life nearly impossible and Palestinians have been forced to choose between death or deportation.

Israel’s message has been unequivocal - Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die.

Launching its ground invasion, Israel has fueled the biggest displacement the region has witnessed since 1948.

Israeli authorities have deliberately inflicted damaging and fatal conditions on the Palestinian population in Gaza, depriving them of food, water, medicine and other objects necessary for their survival, amounting to the crime against humanity, extermination and acts of genocide. 

Last March after a two-month fragile ceasefire with Hamas, Israeli military pushed back into Gaza, continued to kill, wound, starve, and forcibly displace tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, destroy their homes, schools, universities, and health facilities, at a scale unprecedented in recent history rendering much of the Strip uninhabitable, clearly constituting ethnic cleansing in most areas and violating Palestinians’ right to return.

More than 50,399 Palestinians, have been killed and 113, 828 wounded since hostilities escalated on October 7, 2023 according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. 

Israel has repeatedly used food and international humanitarian aid as a tool of collective pressure against more than 2 .3 million Palestinians over 17 months of its devastating war on the Gaza Strip.

Dozens of children have died of starvation and countless others have succumbed to wounds or preventable illnesses during a deteriorating man-made humanitarian disaster.

The combination of the bombs, the blockade and debilitating humanitarian situation is rapidly worsening conditions for the people of Gaza, but it has been a constant since the beginning of the war in October 2023.

On the other hand, in a very dangerous move, Israel’s security cabinet has approved late on March 22 a controversial proposal to facilitate Palestinian emigration from Gaza, a move critics warn could amount to ethnic cleansing.

The security cabinet approved the proposal by Defense Minister Israel Katz to organize “a voluntary transfer for Gaza residents who express interest in moving to third countries, in accordance with Israeli and international law, and following the vision of US President Donald Trump.”

Critics have said that any mass displacement of Gazans in the midst of a devastating war would amount to ethnic cleansing, an act associated with war crimes and crimes against humanity under international law arguing that Israel’s war has made life in Gaza nearly impossible. 

The Israeli approval would establish an administration within the defense ministry “to prepare and facilitate the safe and controlled movement of Gaza residents who wish to voluntarily move to third countries,” according to a statement from the defense ministry.

Its work would include “establishing movement routes, pedestrian checks at designated crossings in the Gaza Strip,” and infrastructure to enable people to leave.

Israeli officials have presented the plan as a fulfillment of a desire by Trump to take over Gaza, expel its Palestinian population to neighboring countries and turn it into a Middle Eastern “riviera.”

The prospect has drawn sharp rebuke from Arab leaders, especially Egypt and Jordan, who would be expected to absorb the large number of expelled Palestinians. Experts have also warned that displacing Palestinians would further destabilize the region and threaten the security of neighboring states.

Moreover, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on March 23 that the security cabinet approved the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, noting that 13 areas in the West Bank would be split from existing settlements and would be recognized as independent settlements.

“Instead of hiding and apologizing – we are raising the flag, building, and settling. This is another important step on the path to actual sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the name by which Israelis refer to the West Bank.

The Yesha Council, an umbrella body representing Jewish settlements, said that as of January 2024, there were 150 settlements in the West Bank.

It said that the decision exposes a “long-standing lie that (Israel) does not establish new settlements, but only ‘neighborhoods’ of existing settlements” and that it is “another nail in the coffin that the Government of Israel is preparing for the only chance for a future of peace and security.”

However, a statement sent by Smotrich’s office said the move comes against “the backdrop of the approval of tens of thousands of housing units in Judea and Samaria and represents another significant step in the process of normalizing and regulating the settlement.”

Smotrich and other right-wing ministers have been pushing an aggressive expansion of settlements on the path to declaring Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, which would be in defiance of international law and UN Security Council resolutions.

In November, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza .

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank are facing daily threats to their very existence while the world just watches.

No Western power, including the United States, which continues to provide Israel with weapons, political endorsement, and direct coordination in these attacks, as confirmed by the White House spokesperson, intends to stop it.

October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the dehumanization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from their historic Palestine.

Israel’s slow-motion theft of land, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem will continue and vigorously exceed if the world keeps watching silently.

Najla M. Shahwan is a Palestinian author, researcher and freelance journalist. Author of thirteen books in literature and a children story collection. Chairwoman of the Palestinian Center for Children’s Literature (PCCL). Founder of Jana Woman Cultural Magazine. Recipient of two prizes from the Palestinian Union of Writers.