Amidst mass forced starvation, Israel has not stopped dropping bombs on Gaza. Bombs on tents. Bombs on homes. Bombs on a water aid station. Bombs at a cell phone charging station in a refugee camp. So many murdered children, and babies, and doctors and journalists, and artists and dreamers.

While Israel continued to drop American bombs on Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in the U.S. on July 7 for private, closed-door talks with the American fascist Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump. The headlines focused on a possible Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.¹ Trump predicted there was a “good chance” for reaching one during the week. His press secretary said it was his “utmost priority.”

The day after this meeting, on July 8, Israel killed over 100 people in Gaza. 

It turned out that no ceasefire agreement was at hand—and all the parties knew it.² All the hype over these negotiations this past week was designed to obscure the enormity of the crimes the U.S. and Israel have been carrying out, and what the Trump-Netanyahu meetings were really about: the fascist Trump’s green-lighting further leaps in their plans to destroy and ethnically cleanse Gaza, and further U.S.-Israeli moves to crush their adversaries, radically reshape the Middle East, and violently lock in U.S. imperialist and Israeli dominance in the Middle East and beyond.³

Many mainstream commentators dismissed Trump’s call to remove all Palestinians from Gaza as a “suggestion” that he “later walked back." Trump has continued to repeat this "suggestion" for open all-out, genocidal ethnic cleansing, and much to Netanyahu’s delight: When asked about the future of Gaza beyond a short-term ceasefire, Netanyahu said, "President Trump had a brilliant vision. It's called free choice. If people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave. It shouldn't be a prison.” Netanyahu went on to say that Israel was working closely with the U.S. to find—or force—countries to take in Palestinians driven out of Gaza. 

Trump chimed in his agreement: “We have had great cooperation from [countries]… surrounding Israel… great cooperation from every single one of them. So something good will happen.”

“Free choice”? “Shouldn’t be a prison”? It’s hard to imagine anything more obscene and criminal. Israel has turned Gaza into an open-air prison—and free-fire zone—for the past 58 years! Since October 2023, it has bombed, bulldozed, starved, and slaughtered the people there. And now it’s talking about “free choices”? That’s a mass murderer with a gun to your head giving you the “free choice” to give him your keys and leave your home or else.

More fundamentally, Trump’s vision of violently expelling Palestinians from Gaza is very real and very serious. While Trump is carrying forward Biden's backing of Israel's genocide in Gaza, this also represents a leap in its form of open terror and violence. The revolutionary leader Bob Avakian described Trump's fascist program for the world this way: “raw destructive power is what must rule in the international arena, without even the pretense of adherence to international law or concern about the sovereignty, or even the right to exist, of less powerful peoples and countries.”

The reality is that the U.S. and Israel have been acting on Trump’s genocidal vision for Palestinians since he first uttered it in January and February. And now the U.S. and Israel are preparing a further, even deadlier leap.

"A Concentration Camp Is a Concentration Camp”

On Monday, July 7, as Netanyahu arrived in the U.S., Israeli Defense Minister Katz announced plans for the construction of what he labeled a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of what was once the city of Rafah in southern Gaza. Katz said this planned “city” was based on Trump’s vision for Gaza. It turns out to be a massive concentration camp, a way station to forcibly expelling Palestinians. This outrageous, terrifying news was barely mentioned by the major media, if mentioned at all.⁴ 

According to the plan Katz unveiled, 600,000 displaced Palestinians, now staying in camps and makeshift homes in the al-Mawasi area of southern Gaza, would be forced into a small area in what was Rafah, a city of 250,000 before Israel drove the population out and leveled it to the ground. 

“Once they arrive in this new zone, security screenings would take place. They won’t be allowed to leave once they’ve entered,” Katz said. “Eventually, the entire civilian population of over two million in Gaza would be confined to this small ‘city,’” Haaretz reported.

When asked about how the new "humanitarian city" would feed Palestinians, Netanyahu replied, "Give them Ben & Jerry's [ice cream], for all I care," a source told Haaretz.⁵

"A concentration camp is a concentration camp,” Israeli broadcast journalist Arad Nir declared. “When you concentrate people in tent cities on top of rubble and give them food there, that's a concentration camp. And yes, we must remember the connotation, because it is a concentration camp. That's what's being planned here."⁶

The connotation he is referring to are the concentration camps the Nazis used to imprison and exterminate Jewish people during the Holocaust, which resulted in the systematic murder of 12 million people—half of them Jews.

There’s no clear timetable for building this concentration camp, but Katz envisioned the possibility of doing so during the two-month ceasefire now being discussed. If so, it would truly be a ceasefire for genocide.⁷

Rafah Concentration Camp: A Continuation and Leap in U.S.-Israeli Genocide

This new U.S.-Israeli concentration camp has not yet been constructed, and it’s possible it won’t be. But this is no pipedream or Trump fantasy. It IS the continuation of—and leap beyond—the strategy Israel has already been carrying out, such as Operation “Gideon’s Chariots,” in concert with the U.S., particularly the fascist Trump regime:

• Israel has now forcibly displaced and confined Palestinians to a mere 15 percent of Gaza.
• It has destroyed most of the territory with missiles, bombs and bulldozers.⁸
• It has slaughtered over 57,000 Palestinians (and the actual death toll is probably double that), and has escalated the killing in recent weeks.

• It has destroyed Gaza’s civilian infrastructure of homes, businesses, hospitals, schools, food production, water distribution, even religious centers and cemeteries.
• It has starved the population, forcing people to risk their lives and move south to eat; already nearly 800 people have been killed seeking aid.
• Last week UNRWA⁹ reported that the percentage of Gazan children suffering from malnourishment has doubled since March, in part because Israel is impeding the delivery of baby formula.

• The Israeli-American "The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation" (GHF) is a key element of the broader plan by the Netanyahu government, with U.S. backing, to concentrate Gaza's population in a narrow strip, as a prelude to being sent to other countries.¹⁰

The Thoroughly Rotten System That’s Given Us Trump Fascism AND Genocide in Gaza 

“I can’t believe Israel is doing this. I can’t believe they’re doing this. I just can’t believe they’re doing this.”

This was the refrain of a Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) activist who had just been released after taking part in a righteous civil disobedience action at the United Nations headquarters in New York demanding a STOP to this genocide. 

It’s not hard to see why she feels this way: what on earth could account for Israel’s limitless cruelty and mass murder of Palestinians, including of innocent civilians and even babies and young children? And why does the U.S. shower Israel with military weaponry, aid and political support so it can keep carrying out these depraved atrocities?

There are answers to these questions, and they lie in the very nature of the capitalist-imperialist system we live under. The problem is not "the Israel lobby." The problem is not a few corporations that benefit from arms sales. The problem is the system of U.S. imperialism which requires Israel as an outpost for their system in the strategic region of the Middle East. All this has been deeply excavated by the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, who has also brought forward a way out of this madness and horror—a scientifically based, liberating alternative and future. Go HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Right now, the very future of the Palestinian people—and really people around the world—is hanging in the balance. As people dig into these questions, it’s also extraordinarily urgent for anyone and everyone with a heart to be actively opposing the Trump fascist regime and the genocide in Gaza. As we wrote last week:  

To those millions taking to the streets in protest over the vile, vicious and fascist ways Trump has been remaking U.S. society and attacking whole groups of people, this crime too deserves your condemnation and active protest.

And to the millions in this country who already agonize about the enormity and unspeakable cruelty of the ongoing genocide in Gaza—recognize the escalation of this under the fascist Trump, come back into the streets, and join this cause to the demand that the Trump Fascist Regime Must Go NOW!

Stop the U.S./Israeli Genocide of the Palestinian People!

The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go NOW!

This Whole System is Rotten and Illegitimate 

We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System