It has been a year since Israel first invaded Rafah and crossed Biden’s illusory “red line.” The Israeli army destroyed the Rafah crossing, isolating Gaza from Egypt and completely cutting it off from the outside world. Israel was free to conduct the mass displacement of Palestinians away from the Egyptian border, but it never admitted to that goal.

But now, Rafah is no more, and Israel’s recently approved plan to reoccupy Gaza indefinitely has made explicit what many have already expected for months: that the ulterior motive of creating permanent military installations and buffer zones in Gaza is to facilitate the mass expulsion of Palestinians.

Israel is now openly announcing its intentions and publicly advertising ethnic cleansing as “voluntary migration.” This didn’t happen overnight, but has been the result of a slow, deliberate process of hemming Palestinians into concentrated sub-ghettoes under fire while creating vast military buffer zones on swathes of flattened Gazan territory. The plan has been implemented in piecemeal over the past 18 months, but now those pieces are falling clearly into place.

Just last week, Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel’s main war aim of “defeating its enemies” superseded the goal of releasing Israeli captives in Gaza, echoing previous statements from his Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, the so-called hardliner.

This isn’t a new development. It has been Israel’s plan all along, but the Israeli government has had to stagger its implementation over the course of a year and a half due to a series of internal and external constraints. Yet it continued to set the stage for ethnic cleansing every step of the way.

The watershed moment came in February during the short-lived ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, when U.S. President Trump articulated his shocking plan for the U.S. to “own” Gaza and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” while the people of Gaza would be relocated elsewhere. Suddenly, the President of the United States was endorsing a plan that Israel had never dared voice in public. Even a month earlier, Netanyahu had said in a televised statement that “Israel has no intention of permanently reoccupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population.”

This is the exact plan that the Israeli war cabinet has just approved.

Since Trump made his February statement, which he later walked back, Israel has been emboldened to go full steam ahead with its plan. The resumption of the war and the blowing........

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