Less than a week after Hamas’s devastating attacks on October 7, Israel’s intelligence ministry produced a chilling document. It advocated that Israel remove all of Gaza’s Palestinian population and forcibly resettle them in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula.
In November, a poster advertising a far-right rally in Tel Aviv juxtaposed an image of two cherubic Jewish-Israeli children on a beach (presumably in a vision of a future Gaza) with the ominous policy prescriptions of “occupy, expel, settle”.
Most worryingly, a cabinet minister suggested that Israel could use nuclear weapons against the Gaza Strip. Does this bellicose and dehumanising rhetoric suggest that Israel’s long-term plan for Gaza is to ethnically cleanse the territory, or even commit genocide there?
