Juan Cole
Informed Comment / May 29, 2026
Ann Arbor – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday instructed his military to seize fully 70% of the Gaza Strip, according to Al-Jazeera.
According to the ceasefire negotiated by Donald Trump last October, Israel retained 54% of Gaza territory in the first phase, with an eye toward an Israeli withdrawal. Since then, the Israeli army has annexed further territory, coming to 64%. Now Netanyahu wants to squeeze the some 2 million Palestinians of Gaza, already living amid rubble and squalor in the densest settlements on earth, into an even smaller patch of land. These actions will further displace families that have already been ethnically cleansed several times.
At Netanyahu’s announcement, an Israeli shouted, “Why not 100% ?” According to The Times of Israel, the prime minister replied, “First 70 percent. We’ll start with that.”
I have sometimes been asked why Israel is so bent on destroying Iran. This is why. Iran is at least a minor obstacle to the complete expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank. It isn’t that Iran is a military danger to nuclear-armed Israel with its arsenal of sophisticated US fighter jets. It is that it is a complication for the project of expanding the territory under Israeli control so as to achieve Greater Israel.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reports that Israeli military forces have escalated killings and the displacement of civilians. They have demanded people depart from where they are sheltering, or stay inside small demarcated areas, especially in “the Israeli-militarised “Yellow Line” zone, including in Gaza City, Der al-Balah, Maghazi, Bureij, and Nuseirat.”
Israeli officials continue to block essential medical supplies and have expelled most aid organizations, according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Dr. Renee Van de Weerdt. She pointed out that despite Israel’s ban on the organization, “nobody can replace what UNRWA is doing.”
Without potable water or health services, “UNRWA medical surveillance teams continue to report an increase in ectoparasitic infections, such as scabies, as well as rodent bites, chickenpox cases, and acute watery diarrhoea among both children under five years and individuals above five years. Nutrition partners observed a 21 per cent increase in malnutrition admissions between January – April 2026 compared to the same period in 2025, despite the ceasefire.”
In other words, Israel may not be starving Palestinians, including Palestinian children, in Gaza, but it is half-starving them, which is unconscionable.
Netanyahu’s cabinet, dominated by the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, has repeatedly made clear its intent to expel all Palestinians in Gaza, which is why the Israeli state destroyed all the schools and universities and most of the hospitals, water purification facilities, and apartment buildings in the Strip. It is why they have created this enormous health and humanitarian crisis among the Palestinian population in Gaza.
It is increasingly difficult to see the substantive difference between the Nazi Generalplan Ost for the Catholic Poles, and the far-right Israeli government’s plan for the Palestinians. Tracking down and killing prominent citizens like professors and journalists, massive urban bombing campaigns reducing cities like Warsaw to rubble, and an assiduous effort to expel Poles and replace them with Germans — all of these measures have their analogues in Netanyahu’s policies toward the Palestinians of Gaza.
I explained in the spring of last year, in a way that other US news sites will not:
- the fascist Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionism Party (the Israeli equivalent of Neo-Nazis) announced Sunday, according to Arab 48, that that work had begun to create a “Expulsion Administration” to implement Trump’s plan to remove the 2.3 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to be settled in a third country. All of this is under the pretext of a “voluntary emigration.”
- Smotrich made his remarks at a gathering of a far right parliamentary caucus, “The Land of Israel”, to which some 51 parliamentarians of both the governing coalition and the opposition belong, and which is dedicated to annexing the Palestinian West Bank, coordinating with the hundreds of thousands of illegal squatters on Palestinian private property. He stressed the necessity of “seizing the opportunity” to implement this plan.
- The finance minister, who wants an Iran-style theocracy inside Israel itself, acknowledged the scale of the operations required to put the plan into action , saying that it is a “huge logistical project. To get everyone out of Gaza, we will need to deport 5,000 people a day, seven days a week, for a whole year, or 10,000 people a day for six months.”
- Also speaking at the gathering, Settlement and National Missions Minister Orit Strook insisted that the expulsion of 2.3 million people from their homes was necessary for Israeli security. She said: “Even if we manage to eliminate Hamas as a civil and military authority, we will not be able to eliminate the threat.” She too belongs to the fascist Religious Zionism Party.
May Angelou said that when people tell you who they are, believe them the first time.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor in the History Department at the University of Michigan
