Jerusalem, Oct 30 (AP) An Israeli authorities ministry has drafted a wartime proposal to switch the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million folks to Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, drawing condemnation from the Palestinians and worsening tensions with Cairo.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s workplace performed down the report compiled by the Intelligence Ministry as a hypothetical train — a “concept paper”. But its conclusions deepened long-standing Egyptian fears that Israel needs to make Gaza into Egypt’s drawback, and revived for Palestinians reminiscences of their biggest trauma — the uprooting of a whole bunch of 1000’s of people that fled or had been pressured from their houses throughout the preventing surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948.

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“We are against transfer to any place, in any form, and we consider it a red line that we will not allow to be crossed,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said of the report. “What happened in 1948 will not be allowed to happen again.”

A mass displacement, Rudeineh said, would be “tantamount to declaring a new war”.

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So way over 8,000 Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, have been killed since Israel went to warfare towards Hamas after its Oct 7 assault.

AIMED AT PRESERVING SECURITY FOR ISRAEL

The doc is dated Oct 13, six days after Hamas militants killed greater than 1,400 folks in southern Israel and took over 240 hostage in an assault that provoked a devastating Israeli warfare in Gaza. It was first printed by Sicha Mekomit, an area information website.

In its report, the Intelligence Ministry — a junior ministry that conducts analysis however doesn’t set coverage — provided three options “to effect a significant change in the civilian reality in the Gaza Strip in light of the Hamas crimes that led to the Sword of Iron war”.

The document’s authors deem this alternative to be the most desirable for Israel’s security.

The document proposes moving Gaza’s civilian population to tent cities in northern Sinai, then building permanent cities and an undefined humanitarian corridor. A security zone would be established inside Israel to block the displaced Palestinians from entering. The report did not say what would become of Gaza once its population is cleared out.

Egypt’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report. But Egypt has made clear throughout this latest war that it does not want to take in a wave of Palestinian refugees.

Egypt has long feared that Israel wants to force a permanent expulsion of Palestinians into its territory, as happened during the war surrounding Israel’s independence. Egypt ruled Gaza between 1948 and 1967, when Israel captured the territory, along with the West Bank and east Jerusalem. The vast majority of Gaza’s population are the descendants of Palestinian refugees uprooted from what is now Israel.

Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah El-Sissi, has said a mass influx of refugees from Gaza would eliminate the Palestinian nationalist cause. It would also risk bringing militants into Sinai, where they might launch attacks on Israel, he said. That would endanger the countries’ 1979 peace treaty. He proposed that Israel instead house Palestinians in its Negev Desert, which neighbors the Gaza Strip, until it ends its military operations.

Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said the paper threatened to damage relations with a key partner.

“If this paper is true, this is a grave mistake. It might cause a strategic rift between Israel and Egypt,” said Guzansky, who said he has consulted for the ministry in the past. “I see it either as ignorance or someone who wants to negatively affect Israel-Egypt relations, which are very important at this stage.”

Egypt is a beneficial companion that cooperates behind the scenes with Israel, he mentioned. If it’s seen as overtly helping an Israeli plan like this, particularly involving the Palestinians, it may very well be “devastating to its stability”.

QUESTIONS OF LEGITIMACY — AND OTHER POSSIBLE DESTINATIONS

Egypt would not necessarily be the Palestinian refugees’ last stop. The document speaks about Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates supporting the plan either financially, or by taking in uprooted residents of Gaza as refugees and in the long term as citizens. Canada’s “lenient” immigration practices additionally make it a possible resettlement goal, the doc provides.

At first look, this proposal “is liable to be complicated in terms of international legitimacy,” the doc acknowledges. “In our assessment, fighting after the population is evacuated would lead to fewer civilian casualties compared to what could be expected if the population were to remain.”

An Israeli official accustomed to the doc mentioned it is not binding and that there was no substantive dialogue of it with safety officers. Netanyahu’s workplace known as it a “concept paper, the likes of which are prepared at all levels of the government and its security agencies”.

“The issue of the day after’ has not been discussed in any official forum in Israel, which is focused at this time on destroying the governing and military capabilities of Hamas,” the prime minister’s workplace mentioned.

The document dismisses the two other options: reinstating the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority as the sovereign in Gaza, or supporting a local regime. Among other reasons, it rejects them as unable to deter attacks on Israel.

The reinstatement of the Palestinian Authority, which was ejected from Gaza after a weeklong 2007 war that put Hamas in power, would be “an unprecedented victory of the Palestinian national movement, a victory that will claim the lives of thousands of Israeli civilians and soldiers, and does not safeguard Israel’s security,” the document says. (AP)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff could not have modified or edited the content material physique)