The base next door: Egypt’s eastern border is in the crosshairs

In under twenty-four hours, three Israeli officials said enough between them to lay bare the intentions of the occupation state and its American patron toward the Gaza Strip. Events have proven that Gaza is no longer merely a thorn in the Hebrew state's side, but an existential threat. And so there is no way to root out this threat except through cauterization. Cauterization here means displacing the people of the Strip, by force if it comes to that, or, failing that, by flinging open a door labeled “voluntary emigration.” 

Last Wednesday, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu toured his forces inside Gaza and insisted Israel would not withdraw from the territory, his defense minister was, in the same breath, unveiling plans already prepared to remove Palestinians from the Strip.

Netanyahu spoke from behind the “yellow line” separating the areas patrolled by Israeli forces from those still under Hamas administration: “We control this area. We are not pulling back. We are staying on this line.”

His defense minister, Israel Katz, addressing a conference hosted by Yedioth Ahronoth, put it more starkly: “In the end, there is no real solution for Gaza without this migration.” Israel, he added, is “organized and ready to move them out by sea, by air, by every possible means,” pending only American backing and a roster of countries willing to take them in.

The next day, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir put a number on it: a plan to remove roughly 1.86 million Palestinians from the Strip over seven years.

According to Yedioth Ahronoth, Ben Gvir intends to present a scheme called “Disengagement 710,” built around what he calls “voluntary migration” from Gaza, targeting 250,000 departures in year one, 1.11 million within three years, and 1.86 million within seven. The far-right minister has spent months developing the plan and intends to make it a centerpiece of his election campaign, with his Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party pushing it as a core demand in any coalition talks for the next Israeli government.

The plan, per the paper, would furnish every departing individual or family with a destination country, legal status, papers and visas, travel funding and initial housing — plus vocational training, job placement help, and up to twenty-four months of support.

Displacement, again

Taken together, these three statements condense a project that some had tried to convince us had shattered on the rock of Arab and Egyptian refusal. It is a project resting on three pillars: squeeze the resistance until it surrenders its weapons; seize as much of the Strip’s territory as possible; and finally, empty Gaza of its people. Under this design, the Strip is folded into Israel’s security perimeter, settlements return to its heart, and the Israeli state is rid of its ‘headache’ once and for all.

That displacement has returned to the front pages — surfacing now in statements and plans laid out openly by the occupation’s leaders — does more than expose the project Washington has been marketing under banners of “peace” and “reconstruction.” It also exposes just how shortsighted, and how complicit, Arab and Muslim states have been in walking, willingly, into a trap set by US President Donald Trump. It is a trap that rescued Israel from its isolation and eased the international pressure bearing down on a state whose leaders had become internationally pursued on charges of war crimes and genocide.

What has been marketed as Trump’s “peace plan” was never a plan to end the war. It was an attempt to repackage the Israeli project in a more palatable, less blunt form, after direct expulsion and outright military occupation had grown too costly to sell openly. Unfortunately, Washington’s regional partners and allies took the bait, leaning on the resistance to accept it and surrender the negotiating cards it still held.

Early in his second term, Trump caused an uproar by calling for roughly two million Palestinians to leave a Gaza Strip already reduced to rubble, floating the idea of turning the devastated coastal territory into a luxury resort, a “Middle East Riviera.”

The idea met resistance, above all from Egypt — the one state, alongside Israel, that shares a border with Gaza — which pushed Trump to shelve it and search instead for a softer alternative, one Arab governments might swallow gradually.

Then, last October, the American president unveiled a twenty-point plan for Gaza that ruled out forced displacement, though Israel’s war minister Israel Katz was quick to clarify that “Trump hasn’t scrapped the idea, only frozen it while he looks for countries willing to take the Palestinians in,” adding that Egypt was not among the options under consideration.

A right-wing alliance for expulsion

What emerges, then, looks coordinated step by step between Washington and Tel Aviv: displacing the Palestinian people from Gaza is a shared goal of Israel’s Zionist right-wing government and America’s own right-wing administration.

Back in August of last year, before Trump ever unveiled his plan, two other plans for controlling Gaza were already on the table: one Israeli, one American.

The Israeli plan, approved by the security cabinet in August 2025, called for imposing full Israeli security control over Gaza, eliminating Hamas and disarming the Strip, then installing a civil administration answerable to neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority. Military control of Gaza City, and the relocation of its residents to the south of the Strip, sat at the center of the Israeli vision.

At the same time, a Washington Post report revealed an American vision for administering Gaza for roughly a decade — reconstruction, conversion into an industrial and tourism hub, "smart cities,” and a wholesale reshuffling of land ownership through digital tokens that owners could redeem to fund new lives outside the Strip, or later exchange for housing units in the new developments.

This was never a purely American vision. Israelis helped draft it, and it was tied to the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The difference between the two projects, in the end, came down only to method. Israel wanted to impose its version by force of arms, siege, and starvation; the American vision offered the softer, more marketable cut: reconstruction, investment, gleaming new cities, compensation, transitional administration, aid.

Once both plans were exposed, it was Trump’s turn to offer a third version under a far more attractive label: peace.

In September 2025, Trump’s twenty-point plan was unveiled as the road to ending the war. A ceasefire, release of hostages, an influx of aid, an Israeli withdrawal, transitional governance arrangements, and a “Board of Peace” to oversee the next phase. Disarming Hamas and the Palestinian factions, and ending their role in governing Gaza, sat at the heart of the plan’s security and political arrangements.

A Palestinian state, meanwhile, appeared only as a smokescreen, mentioned in a vaguely conditional pathway tied to overhauling the Palestinian Authority and a long list of political and security reforms to be satisfied first. Trump’s plan, in other words, did not dismantle the two prior projects; it recast them in a document with a chance of winning Arab and international approval.

Deception, cont’d

The plan’s purpose was to convince Arabs and Palestinians it marked an end to the war and to Palestinian suffering in the Strip. Its actual substance hands Israel what it failed to win by force: once its hostages and the bodies of its dead are returned, any political, military, or security role for Hamas in Gaza ends, the movement and the rest of the resistance factions are compelled to surrender their weapons. This would pave the way for the expulsion of Palestinians from their land, in whatever form that ultimately takes.

Under the weight of humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and intense Arab and regional pressure, Hamas and the resistance factions accepted the path presented to them as the road to ending the war. They handed over the most significant leverage they held: hostages, bodies, the lot. But the moment Palestinians met their side of the bargain, Israel began to stall, refusing to follow through on its own obligations.

The next phase stalled. Israeli forces — still occupying roughly 60% of the Strip — kept obstructing its progress, even escalated the killing, destruction, and abduction, all under a veil of American silence widely read as a green light letting the occupation carry out its plan quietly, without the noise that would once again brand it a pariah state internationally.

Carrying out the displacement scheme, in the form now being marketed by Israel and the US as “voluntary migration,” allows Washington and Tel Aviv to kill two birds with one stone. This is no longer only about emptying the Strip of a population Israel treats as a ticking time bomb threatening its security. It is also about clearing away anything that might stand in the way of the American military base Washington intends to build in the Negev Desert, now that its Gulf bases have proven within reach of Iranian missiles and drones.

According to The Wall Street Journal, US Central Command is weighing relocating the operational systems of its bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia to Israel. Among the options on the table is a new American base in the Negev capable of housing US forces, following damage sustained at American facilities during the recent confrontation with Iran.

This, then, is no longer just about emptying Gaza — the first line of defense for Egypt’s own national security — of its people. It now also means planting an American military base within sight of the Egyptian border, with everything that implies for a country that still regards Israel as a strategic adversary, and remains convinced that confrontation with it is only a matter of time. So, the question lingers: what are we going to do?