BREAKING: #Israel‘s Netanyahu confirms operational plans to forcibly transfer – and possibly deport – 1.3 million #Palestinians coerced to #Rafah at #Gaza‘s most southern end. An operational plan conceived, as I had argued, four months ago. pic.twitter.com/nT1tjpH3SK
— Itay Epshtain (@EpshtainItay) February 9, 2024
Earlier today, Bibi Netanyahu issued a directive to his generals to prepare a plan to expel the 1.5-million Gazans taking shelter in Rafah, after they were driven from their homes in northern and central Gaza. That is over half of Gaza’s total population and five times the number of inhabitants before the war. Of them, 600,000 are children. He warned a ground invasion was imminent, within the next two weeks.
The IDF will repeat the “magic” in performed in northern Gaza: demand they leave, and poof–they disappear! It’s like demanding that a paraplegic get up from his wheelchair and walk. If not, you’ll put a bullet in his head.
Amnesty International’s secretary general tweeted:
Evacuation?? BUT WHERE? There is nowhere to go to. @amnesty is reiterating that Palestinians in Gaza are at grave risk of genocide. The international community has an obligation to act to prevent genocide. https://t.co/O550OkdBNT
— Agnes Callamard (@AgnesCallamard) February 9, 2024
Netanyahu uses a euphemism, “evacuation,” to describe the operation. But there can be no evacuation, nor will the IDF conduct one. It did not do so in northern Gaza during early fighting there. It simply entered and destroyed the place. Residents had to flee and many were murdered as they traveled south to take refuge there.
I fear that the IDF will do the same in Rafah. It will begin razing the place and leave any Palestinians there to fend for themselves. Many thousands of civilians will die as a result.
Israel’s Channel 12 reports that the attack will begin in two weeks. During his visit, Netanyahu also informed Blinken of the plans. The secretary of state can’t have been too happen, considering he was trying to negotiate a ceasefire. It makes Blinken and Biden look like fools. They’re being played by Bibi.
Even if Netanyahu is serious about “evacuating” civilians in Rafah, where would he put them? The most likely location would be Egypt. But it has made clear that not only does it reject this proposal, but that it would jeopardize the 1977 Sinai accord. Egypt rightly sees this as a violation of its sovereignty. Not to mention it neither needs nor wants 1-million angry, vengeful, impoverished Palestinians inside its borders.
Bibi earlier proposed that the World Bank forgive tens of billions of its loans to Egypt in return for taking in the expelled Gazans. It’s so like the Israel to palm its proposal off on the Bank. Such an arrangement secures its own interests at someone else’s expense. Naturally, Bibi’s proposal went nowhere.
Ethnic-cleansing has a long history going all the way back to the Nakba. 1-million indigenous Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948. 300,000 more were expelled from the West Bank in the 1967 War. To paraphrase a famous saying about the Congressional budget attributed to Sen. Everett Dirksen: a million here, a million there, pretty soon you’re talking about real genocide.
There is no other place for Palestinians to go. They will remain in Gaza like rats in a maze. Everywhere they turn death awaits them. It goes without saying that this is an escalation in Israel’s genocidal project. It was already genocide. This is Genocide+.
Bibi’s motivation can be interpreted in several ways. The first is that he’s serious and will carry out this order. The next is that he is responding to Hamas’ ceasefire proposal and his rejection of it by escalating his rhetoric. It is a big fuck-you both to Hamas; the US which has been pressuring him to respond seriously to it; and Qatar, which has served as the mediator during this process. If that’s the case, then the war will continue and Biden’s attempt to bring it to a close has gone for naught.
Finally, Bibi’s aim may be to escalate pressure on Hamas to accept his own conditions for a ceasefire. He may (mistakenly) believe that if Hamas knows he will expel much of Gaza’s population and thereby threaten its base of popular support, this will squeeze it into submission. There is no prospect that this will have the desired effect. And he should know that by now. Hamas will fight till the last man if it has to. Then it will replace those it lost with new recruits.
Netanyahu has placed Joe Biden in a vulnerable position. He has closed the door on a ceasefire, one which Biden desperately sought. The longer the war continues the closer we get to the November elections. As it is, Biden is running behind Trump in the polls. He can ill afford to lose both the Arab-American vote and hundreds of thousands of Americans disgusted with the war and his unwavering support for it. There is a real prospect he will lose the election.
The $17.6-billion aid package which will ship missiles and other military equipment to Israel is a case in point. Over $1-billion of that is earmarked for Gaza humanitarian aid. The language of the bill designates the aid for support to Palestinians inside or outside Gaza. In other words, the State Department indicated the funds could be used for refugees who’ve been expelled by Israel from Gaza. It seems likely that it crafted the bill’s language with just that eventuality in mind. How could our government even contemplate such an abominable prospect?
Im ashamed to be Canadian were walking brainwashed Zionists tools.Our leaders in the west are idiots, all in lockstep of what American wants and what Isreal wants.The Zionists are weak baby killers,Hamas and Hesbola are freedom fighters and I believe they will liberate Palastine but the process is heart breaking.
How can President Biden influence and persuade Prime Minister Netanyahu to consider a ceasefire so that needed humanitarian aid can reach Palestinians forced into southern Gaza where they were earlier assured it would be a safe place for them and for a hostage/prisoner exchange to occur while most are still alive if the U.S. continues to ship so many large bombs to Israel for the IDF to deploy during airstrikes on densely populated areas where mainly so many young children and women are being killed?
Although Netanyahu’s agenda for the “removal” of Palestinians was planned earlier, which may be why all Israeli border security guards were ordered to leave their posts or stations along the frontier with Gaza while the most sophisticated alarm system was turned off early in the morning before the Massacre on October 7, 2023, their expulsion cannot occur because they have no place to go if the IDF can start a ground invasion in a few days that will become a massive genocide of over a million unless we contact Washington immediately. He is misanthropic to the point of murdering unarmed Palestinians and destroying their homes where they can no longer return. If he was financially able to bring Hamas to power in Gaza, Netanyahu could arrange for Putin to have Spetsnaz train the terrorists who murdered over a thousand Israels and abducted about 250. I know how demagogues act to stir up hatred and create a Machiavellian war by planning a 9-11.
Unless Americans and Europeans act now, unlike the current death toll in Gaza of 28,000, by March a million Palestinians may be murdered by the IDF. Do you think Egypt’s army and other Arab nations in the Middle East are going to accept this forthcoming genocide unless Washington and Brussels act now to prevent it? This would be just what Netanyahu’s close friend Putin would like so the Kremlin might be able to defeat Ukraine.
Meanwhile America’s Indo-Pacific military pact where most populus Muslim nations exist in East Asia may no longer support the U.S. as China’s hegemony increases–especially in Southeast Asia. America’s defense and national security depend and hinge on preventing a massive genocide in Gaza and stopping all further arms shipments now to Israel. While over 85 percent of all Israelis want Netanyahu to resign, the Knesset is controlled by his far-right political supporters.
While there are now higher death rates from wars in Africa and Asia, if Americans and Europeans should fail to act immediately by contacting Members of Congress and the President at White House and also Members of Parliments and leaders of all EU nations, troops from the West may soon be deployed in the Middle East at even a heavier cost of civilian and military casualties and deaths than from all previous recent wars combined.
If Ukraine were to be defeated by Russia, the Kremlin might first bypass Europe and strike America from both Russian Aerospace Force bases on La Orchila Island in the Caribbean Sea and at Punta Huete Airport located in Central America, which is similar to the attempted thermonuclear Missile Crisis by Russia of the USSR over 40 years ago when Putin was assigned to oversee that operation in 1982. Unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Putin’s current plan is completely operational where several thousand technicians and troops are now deployed for Missile Crisis III. Therefore, we must now prevent a massive genocide in Gaza that may lead to a thermonuclear war soon against America. As you wish!
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