Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Basil Maghribi at the Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that Energy and Infrastructure Minister Eli Cohen ordered late Sunday that all electricity deliveries from Israel to Gaza be halted immediately.
Maghribi cautions that Israel does not deliver very much electricity to Gaza — most of it is generated by an internal power plant using fuel. But Israeli electricity does power a desalinization plant in Mawasi, so the move will reduce the amount of potable water available to Palestinians. The Palestinians pay substantial sums monthly for this Israeli electricity.
AP explains that the Mawasi plant had been producing 18,000 cubic meters of water each day for the Deir al-Balah governorate in the center of Gaza. The plant can still function at a much reduced level with what fuel still exists in Gaza (the Israelis have not been letting any food, medicine or fuel in for the past week), and can put out 2,500 cubic meters each day, only 14% of the previous level.
The move comes, Maghribi points out, in the context of threats by US President Donald Trump and his special envoy for the Middle East, businessman Steve Witkoff, to start back up the war on Gaza if Hamas does not release all Israeli hostages. Hamas had agreed to a schedule for such releases, which should now be entering phase two, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to begin talks on phase 2 and appears to wish to end the ceasefire agreement so that he can start bombing Gaza again. In fact, he has been bombing Gaza again.
Israel’s Channel 12 reported that official Israeli sources said that the next step would be to deprive Gaza of water entirely.
The Israeli government is cutting Palestinian civilians in Gaza off from staples as a means of pressuring Hamas to release all Israeli hostages with no quid pro quo so that Netanyahu can start bombing again. This collective punishment of civilians violates the Geneva Convention and other elements of internationally agreed on laws of war to which Israel is signatory. It also violates the preliminary injunction of the International Court of Justice, in which Israel also has membership.
At the same time, 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.”
Photo of Gaza summer ’24 by Emad El Byed on Unsplash
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.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, stipulates that “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”
The Nazis also plotted at forced transfers of populations, including Poles and Jews. The Wiener Holocaust Library explains that in autumn 1941, about 338,000 Jews remained in Greater Germany. Until then, Hitler had hesitated to deport them, fearing public backlash. However, mounting pressure from key Nazi figures led him to order their deportation between September 15-17. Himmler, Heydrich, and Eichmann then sought space for them in the already packed ghettos of Łódź, Litzmannstadt, Minsk, and Riga, instructing officials to accommodate them despite severe overcrowding.
Am I comparing the plans of the extremist Israeli government to those of the Nazis? No, of course not. But people whose grandparents and great-grandparents suffered from this sort of lawless disregard for basic human rights should be ashamed to propose such measures themselves.
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