Where Things Appear to be Headed in Gaza
What was called wild speculation in 2023 now reads like a blueprint: make Gaza unlivable, empty it out, and reeducate the children who remain.
Rev. J. Mark Davidson
7/9/19263 min read
On October 10, 2025, the date of the current “ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas, Israel occupied and controlled 53% of Gaza. Nine months later, Israel occupies and controls close to 70% of Gaza. The so-called “Yellow Line” was supposed to be an unchangeable, agreed-upon boundary separating Israeli-controlled territory and Hamas-controlled territory. In practice, however, Israel has been moving the “Yellow Line,” steadily encroaching on Palestinian land and expanding the occupation of Gaza. During the so-called “ceasefire,” in addition to killing over 1,100 Palestinians, Israel’s military has forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas. Roughly two million people are now crowded into an area approximately ¼ of the already densely populated Gaza Strip. That’s about 7 miles long and 5 miles wide, an area ¼ the size of Philadelphia. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been boasting that Israel will soon occupy and fully control 100% of Gaza. This is not farfetched. The United Nations is incapable of stopping this from happening. The United States has a lock on the Security Council. The “Board of Peace,” an illegitimate assemblage of dictators, human rights abusers, and war criminals, is doing the bidding of Israel and the Trump administration. The “Board of Peace” is pressuring the Palestinian side to submit to new, totally unacceptable, conditions, or the Board of Peace will nullify the “ceasefire,” and reopen the door to Israel’s full-scale genocidal violence.
Once Israel takes total control of Gaza, they will carry out the original plan laid out in an Israeli Defense Intelligence “white paper” in the fall of 2023. I sounded the alarm about this plan in an opinion piece submitted to the Raleigh News and Observer in November 2023. The editors refused to print any mention of this plan, saying it was wild speculation and totally improbable. Israel’s plan all along was to render Gaza “unlivable.” Now, Israel’s next step is to “empty out” Gaza by forced deportation of Palestinians to other countries, or to massive tent cities in the Sinai desert. They have cynically named this ethnic cleansing operation – “voluntary migration.” Those who are not deported or driven into the desert will be concentrated into population pods in the southern part of Gaza they are calling “humanitarian cities.” These concentration camps (not an exaggeration) will offer slightly improved housing, slightly better food, and minimal healthcare. They will be screened and prevented from leaving, while international organizations will provide aid. Many proud Palestinians will denounce these Zionist “humanitarian cities.” But the concern is that many desperate, starving Palestinians, daily bombed, miserable, abandoned by the world, and hopeless, may conclude that life would be better inside one of these Israeli-surveilled holding pens.
As we have explored in this column in previous issues, there is a concerted effort by Israeli government agencies and private donors in Israel and the United States to take over the education of the next generation of Palestinian children. One morally reprehensible example of this trend is the “Gaza Children Village.” Its “educational” component involves a curriculum which reportedly erases the Palestinian story, attempts to crush Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression, and rewrite history so that the next generation of Palestinians will be docile and see the Israelis as “benevolent masters” who only have the interests of the Palestinian people at heart, e.g. - See how they “helped” us by giving us a roof over our heads when we were living in tents, how they fed us when we were hungry, and taught our children. See how the future is “global citizenship and peace,” code for accepting Israeli rule. It is a curriculum that completely denies Palestinian dignity, and erases the Palestinian demand for self-determination. It is, to my mind, a pernicious form of intrusive social engineering by a colonial power.
I am haunted by the knowledge that a) this was the plan all along, b) they built on the “structures of compliance” the Israelis painstakingly put in place within the United States so that Israel would have all the military weapons it needed to carry out this plan, and the media, political, and diplomatic cover to justify and defend it, c) nothing was done to put a stop to it, no enforcement of international law or American laws prohibiting human rights violations, d) at least so far, there has been no real accountability for these crimes and atrocities, and e) Israel is doing the same things in the West Bank and in Lebanon as we speak. I dearly hope I’m wrong that this is where things appear to be headed in Gaza. And, naturally, none of us has any way of predicting the timeline for these tragic events. But the trajectory is unmistakable.