The Financial Times revealed this month that a cabal of Israeli investors, one of the world’s top business consulting groups and a think-tank headed by former British prime minister Tony Blair had been secretly working on plans to exploit the ruins of Gaza as prime real estate. The secret consortium appears to have been seeking practical ways to realise US President Donald Trump’s “vision” of Gaza as the “Riviera of the Middle East”: transforming the small coastal enclave into a playground for the rich and an enticing investment opportunity, once it can be ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian population. Meanwhile, the UK government has declared Palestine Action a terrorist organisation – the first time in British history that a direct-action campaign group has been banned under Britain’s already draconian terrorism legislation.

Notably, the government of Keir Starmer took the decision to proscribe Palestine Action after lobbying from Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons maker whose factories in the UK have been targeted by Palestine Action for disruption. Elbit supplies Israel with killer drones and other weapons central to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. These revelations came to light as the United Nation’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, published a report – titled “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide” – exposing Big Business’ extensive involvement in, and profits from, Israel’s crimes in Gaza.

Israeli soldiers have testified that they are being ordered to shoot into crowds of starving Palestinians queueing for food at these hubs – explaining why dozens of Palestinians have been killed daily for weeks on end. Those hubs, run by the misleadingly named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, were in part the brainchild
of the Boston Consulting Group, the same management consultants caught this month plotting to turn Gaza into Trump’s Palestinian-free “Riviera of the Middle East”. Doubtless other contractors, using largely automated systems, will control the camp’s interior until, in the Israeli government’s words, “an emigration plan” can be implemented to expel the population from Gaza.