https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/05/trump-gaza-ethnic-cleansing
“They make a desert and call it peace,” said Tacitus, paraphrasing Calgacus.
Israel, meanwhile, has made a graveyard of Gaza, and Donald Trump is calling it a real estate opportunity. The president, as you will know, has decided the US should just take over the Gaza Strip. As for the Palestinians who are inconveniently there at the moment? According to Trump, they can just be moved somewhere else. They can be dumped in Jordan or Egypt or Saudi Arabia. They won’t mind. Those Arabs are all the same anyway.
It’s not clear, by the way, exactly how many Palestinians are actually left to be moved. Fifteen months ago there were an estimated 2.1m people in Gaza. The official death toll is now almost 62,000 people but this is very likely a gross underestimate that doesn’t account for all the “indirect deaths” from disease and starvation. Writing in the Guardian in September, Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, noted that according to an extrapolation of one estimate published in the Lancet medical journal, the death toll would be estimated at about 335,500 in total.
It seems Trump might agree with that estimate. While waxing lyrical about his planned crimes against humanity, Trump said “we’re talking about probably 1.7 million, maybe 1.8 million” people in Gaza who would need to be moved. If only reporters at Trump’s press conferences would ask him if he knows exactly how many people are dead, eh? However, it would seem that much of the US press simply aren’t that interested.
There is a lot of interest in Trump’s plans to redevelop Gaza, however. The word ‘shocking’ has been bandied around a lot to describe these very Trumpian real estate fantasies. And, yes, the fact that the president is being so blunt, so open, about what he wants to do is shocking. But the idea that the US and Israel might want to get rid of all the Palestinians in the strip should hardly come as a shock to anyone. This, after all, is effectively what Israel’s politicians and pundits, along with Israel’s supporters, have been saying all along: they want to make Gaza unliveable and get all the Palestinians out.
In October 2023, for example, Major General Giora Eiland, who is highly influential, wrote in an Israeli paper that: “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” In another article, Eiland wrote: “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”
Other people have been very open that they want certain types of human beings to exist in Gaza—just not Palestinians... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/05/trump-gaza-ethnic-cleansing
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