Trump Plan for Gaza "Worse Than Ethnic Cleansing," Says UN Human Rights Expert
Unlawful deportation or transfer of a population constitutes both a war crime and a crime against humanity.
By Marjorie Cohn , Truthout
Published February 9, 2025
Displaced Palestinians cross the Netzarim Corridor as they make their way to the northern parts of the Gaza Strip on February 9, 2025.
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.”
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. “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.”
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-plan-for-gaza-worse-than-ethnic-cleansing-says-un-human-rights-expert/
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