The controversial US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has proposed creating camps called “Humanitarian Transit Areas” in the Gaza Strip to house Palestinians and “deradicalise” them, Reuters reported on Monday.
The proposal is part of an overall strategy to end the control of Hamas over the Palestinian enclave.
Reuters reported that the $2bn plan was submitted to the Trump administration and recently discussed in the White House.
The camps are described as “large-scale” and “voluntary” in the plan, and places that Palestinians can “temporarily reside, deradicalize, re-integrate and prepare to relocate if they wish to do so.”
A slide deck seen by Reuters called for using the sprawling facilities to “gain trust with the local population” and to facilitate US President Donald Trump’s “vision for Gaza“.
Reuters could not independently determine the status of the plan, while the group told the news agency the slides were “not a GHF document”.
GHF said it had studied “a range of theoretical options to safely deliver aid in Gaza“, but that it was “not planning for or implementing Humanitarian Transit Areas”.
There have been repeated references by both the Israeli and US governments to transferring the population of Gaza from the territory, a move that would amount to ethnic cleansing.
Israel stopped any aid from entering Gaza for three months after unilaterally ending a ceasefire with Hamas in March.
The GHF was set up with US and Israeli backing. with the aim of supplanting United Nations-led aid coordination mechanisms in Gaza.
Its rollout of services since May has been chaotic. Israeli forces have killed more than 600 Palestinians and wounded another 4,000 by firing on people desperately seeking access to aid at the GHF’s few distribution sites.
In a statement sent to Middle East Eye, GHF said it was “not planning for or implementing Humanitarian Transit Areas now or at any point in the future” and said Reuters original report was “false.”
“The presentation they cite is not a GHF document and has nothing to do with our organization or mission, period. It is disturbing that they falsely reported this disinformation despite repeated denials,” said Chapin Fay, a spokesperson for GHF.
“Our sole focus remains on scaling up food aid operations to meet the urgent and overwhelming needs of the population in Gaza.”
It was revealed over the weekend that a consulting firm involved in the GHF entered into a multimillion-dollar contract to develop the initiative and modelled a plan to “relocate” Palestinians from Gaza as part of its work.
A Financial Times investigation has revealed its work included financial modelling for the post-war reconstruction of Gaza, commissioned by Israeli backers, with one scenario envisioning the “voluntary relocation” of Palestinians from the enclave.
This would have involved paying out “relocation packages” to 500,000 people worth $9,000 per person to encourage people to leave the territory.
The model assumed a quarter of Palestinians would opt to leave Gaza, with three-quarters of them unlikely to return.
It estimated the cost of expulsion of Palestinians to be $23,000 cheaper, per Palestinian, than the costs of providing support to them in Gaza during reconstruction.
According to the Boston Consulting Group, this side of the operation was conducted without the knowledge of senior management and against their instructions.
Source: Middle East Eye
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