Trump Plan for Gaza “Worse Than Ethnic Cleansing,” Says UN Human Rights Expert

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Human Rights and Global Wrongs

Donald Trump’s outrageous plan to remove the Palestinian people from Gaza, assume U.S. ownership of the Gaza Strip and make it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” reveals his intent to commit a war crime and a crime against humanity.

What Trump proposed during a February 4 news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House is “unlawful, immoral and irresponsible,” Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, said at a February 5 press conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. “This is worse than ethnic cleansing. It’s forced displacement … which is an international crime.”

War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity

The unlawful deportation or transfer of a population constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention classifies unlawful deportation or transfer as a grave breach, which is considered a war crime by the U.S. War Crimes Act. Article 49 of Geneva says that individual or mass forcible transfers and deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of any other country, whether occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on July 19, 2024, that Gaza is occupied territory and that the occupation violates international law.

Moreover, forcible transfer or deportation committed as “part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack” is a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute. Israel, with U.S. complicity, has been committing a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian people in Gaza since October 7, 2023. “Deportation or forcible transfer of population” is defined as the displacement of people by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area where they are lawfully present.

On January 26, 2024, the ICJ found that Israel is plausibly committing a genocide in Gaza and ordered it to prevent the commission of genocidal acts. “Forcible displacement and dispossession in the context of a genocide,” Albanese noted, “will strengthen the complicity in the crimes that Israel has been committing over the past 15 months and before.”

Trump’s plan would elevate U.S. aiding and abetting of Israel’s genocide to a new level.

Trump’s plan would elevate U.S. aiding and abetting of Israel’s genocide to a new level.

“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Trump declared at the press conference with Netanyahu. “We’ll own it … get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area … do something different, just can’t go back, if you go back, it’s gonna end up the same way it has for 100 years.”

Albanese replied that “no one has the right to say how Gaza will be rebuilt, other than the Palestinians.”

The Palestinians’ Legal Right of Return

“I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza,” Trump said. “Why would they want to return? The place has been hell.”

It is Israel’s genocidal campaign that has made Gaza a “hell.” Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed nearly 62,000 Palestinian people and rendered 85 percent of the population homeless, using U.S. bombs. Nevertheless, when the ceasefire began, the Palestinians began returning, because it is their homeland. Palestinian refugees have a legal right to return to their lands.

“Anyone who saw the video clips on social media exhibiting the joy Palestinians felt upon returning home to northern Gaza despite its total devastation — and putting up tents on top of the rubble of their destroyed homes — will understand the meaning of Palestinians’ attachment to their homeland,” Palestinian American Michel Moushabeck wrote at Truthout. “It would be naïve for anyone, including President Trump, to believe that Palestinians will voluntarily leave their homeland and resettle elsewhere.”

In 1947-1948, Israel carried out the Nakba (or “catastrophe”), the violent campaign of ethnic cleansing that forced 750,000 Palestinians from their land in order to create Israel. Mass atrocities and dozens of massacres killed roughly 15,000 Palestinians. The Nakba caused the forced displacement of 85 percent of the Palestinian population. “We shouldn’t call them Palestinian refugees,” Albanese said. “We should call them Nakba survivors, deprived of a homeland.”

The UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194 in 1948, which established the right of return for Palestinian refugees. It says that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”

Roughly two-thirds of the Palestinians in Gaza are refugees whose families were forced from their homes or fled in fear during and after the establishment of Israel in 1948. But for 76 years, Israel has categorically denied them their right to return, in spite of Resolution 194.

Albanese said that Israel “will not kill the right of return because the right of return is established under international law that predates the creation of the state of Israel.”

Israel is intentionally repeating the Nakba of 76 years ago. “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” Israeli security cabinet member and Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter declared on November 12, 2023. “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it will end.”

The Palestinians’ Right to Self-Determination

The Palestinian people have the lawful right to self-determination. The ICJ ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza violates international law, which prohibits the acquisition of territory by threat or use of force and enshrines the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. “The sustained abuse by Israel of its position as an occupying Power, through annexation and an assertion of permanent control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory and continued frustration of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, violates fundamental principles of international law and renders Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful,” the court wrote.

On February 4, Trump issued an executive order permanently defunding UNRWA, the agency that has provided food, education and health care to Palestinian refugees since 1949. UNRWA is the only organization in Gaza able to attend to the urgent needs of the Palestinians who have endured Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war. Defunding UNRWA will invariably intensify the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Only the General Assembly can decide the future of UNRWA, Albanese noted.

Netanyahu has long been gunning for UNRWA. In 2018, he said that “UNRWA is an organisation that perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem and the narrative of the right-of-return, as it were, in order to eliminate the State of Israel” and it needed “to pass from the world.” The process of defunding UNRWA by the U.S. and other countries began during the Biden administration.

Before Netanyahu’s visit, Trump stated his intention to send Israel $1 billion in additional weapons, including $700 million for 1,000-pound bombs and $300 million for armored bulldozers. Trump also lifted the Biden administration’s suspension of deliveries of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.

Palestinians Appeal to the International Community

A number of countries oppose Trump’s plan, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, France, Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Russia, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Brazil and Turkey.

Instead of welcoming Netanyahu to the White House, Trump should have sent him to The Hague to face the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity that are pending against him in the International Criminal Court. However, Trump, who has faced a complaint brought by Palestinians in the ICC, has a history of attempting to undermine the ICC. During his first term, Trump imposed sanctions on the ICC’s chief prosecutor and another high ICC official for investigating alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Afghanistan by U.S. military forces, the CIA and the Taliban.

On February 6, Trump signed an executive order slapping economic and travel sanctions on ICC employees who participate in investigations of citizens of the U.S. and its allies, including Israel.

In its decision finding Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory unlawful, the ICJ ordered states to “abstain from diplomatic relations with Israel, and economic or trade dealings or investments that may entrench Israel’s unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory or assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel there.”

Albanese said she was “shocked at the defiance toward international law, not just by Israel, but by most countries in the international community,” including Denmark, a country renowned for its generous provision of public goods for its citizens as a social democracy. During her press conference, she urged the Danish government to reveal all its ties with Israel, including diplomatic, political, military and strategic research. She said it should “suspend anything that the ICJ found is detrimental to the rights of the Palestinians.”

“If Trump is so concerned that Gaza is an uninhabitable wasteland, he should instead contribute generously to the $50 billion to $80 billion it will cost Palestinians to rebuild,” Ben Saul, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald. “He should pressure Israel to compensate Gazans for its many violations of humanitarian law during the war. He should stop shipping US weapons and munitions to Israel.”

On February 5, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and other Palestinian human rights organizations issued a statement calling on the international community to:

• Call on the United States to retract its plan to forcibly displace Palestinians in Gaza, and reject any attempts by Israel to formally annex the West Bank;
• Ensure that Palestinians exercise their right of return to what is left of their homes in Gaza in safety, protection, and dignity, and ensure the provision of shelter, food and medical care to displaced Palestinians in the OPT,
• Ensure the immediate and unimpeded provision of all material, logistical, financial, and social support required by Palestinians in Gaza;
• Publicly condemn the use of sanctions to undermine the ICC, and the dismantling of UNRWA;
• For European States to take actions to implement the EU Blocking Statute to shield against US sanctions on the International Criminal Court;
• Fully cooperate with the International Criminal Court, enforce the arrest warrants to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant; and expand the charges to include settlements and genocide;
• Compel Israel to rescind its legislation banning UNRWA, and urge the U.S. to reinstate the funding to the UNRWA;
• Intervene in the UNRWA Advisory Opinion before the International Court of Justice; and intervene in the South Africa v Israel genocide case;
• Address the root causes of the genocide, by dismantling Israel’s Zionist settler-colonial apartheid regime and ending the illegal occupation;
• Impose sanctions, including a two-way military embargo, encompassing all arms, banking, financial, economic, trade and diplomatic sanctions on Israel; including ending all gas deals with Israel, using pipelines located in Palestine’s territorial waters off Gaza;
• Call on social movements, activist groups and persons of conscience in solidarity with Palestine to use all means available to campaign against and disrupt President Trump’s colonial genocidal plans.

The Palestinian people adamantly oppose Trump’s illegal plan. “Palestine belongs to its Indigenous people; it does not belong to those who have stolen the land, forcibly displacing its inhabitants and are now intent on ethnically cleansing those who remained,” Moushabeck wrote.