The human detritus will be flushed to a northern Egyptian desert. From Jonathan Cook at antiwar.com:
All the signs are in place that Israel is once again seriously considering a massive ethnic cleansing operation, conducted at lightning speed and with US assistance
As Israeli forces began making limited ground incursions into northern Gaza over the weekend, reports proliferated that Israel was readying plans to expel much or all of the enclave’s population into the neighboring Egyptian territory of Sinai.
In part, those fears were fueled by a report last week, published in the Israeli outlet Calcalist, of a leaked policy draft from the intelligence ministry outlining just such an ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza.
Further concerns were raised by a report in the Financial Times on Monday that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had lobbied the European Union on the idea of driving the strip’s Palestinians into Sinai under cover of war.
Some EU members, including the Czech Republic and Austria, were said to have been receptive and floated the idea at a meeting of member states last week. An unnamed European diplomat told the FT: “Now is the time to put increased pressure on the Egyptians to agree.”
According to the leaked Israeli intelligence ministrydocument, after their expulsion, Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians would initially be housed in tent cities, before permanent communities could be built in the peninsula’s north.
A military “sterile zone”, several kilometres wide, would prevent any return to Gaza. Longer term, Israel would encourage other states – especially Canada, European countries such as Greece and Spain, and North African countries – to absorb the Palestinian population in Sinai.
The ministry reportedly believes the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai would be “liable to provide positive and long-lasting strategic results”.
For Palestinians, on the other hand, it has traumatic echoes of Israel’s mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland at Israel’s creation in 1948 – what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe.
