Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has defined the 1948 Nakba as a “plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” This plan, code-named “Plan Dalet,” was the fourth and final version of a carefully crafted blueprint developed in 1947 and aiming to expel Palestinians from their homeland.
What has unfolded in Gaza since 7 October 2023 – a humanitarian catastrophe far exceeding the death toll and destruction of the Nakba and all previous Gaza wars – appears to be an evolved version of Plan Dalet.
This time, the goal is not only to expel Palestinians but also to physically eliminate them, with a deliberate focus on children and women, the two population groups driving the Palestinian demographic growth that has long haunted Israeli strategists.
Women and children have borne the brunt of the war on Gaza: they are deliberately targeted, killed, injured, starved, and deprived of basic medical care.
According to the latest UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights report, women and children comprise 70 per cent of the dead and wounded in Gaza. These casualties result from relentless airstrikes on residential buildings and displacement centres and direct targeting.
In an interview with the US network CBS, a Jewish-American doctor returning from Gaza stated he had never seen such mutilated and severely wounded children in his life, alleging direct sniper attacks by the Israeli Army.
European and American doctors volunteering in Gaza hospitals quoted by the UK Guardian newspaper have testified to witnessing trauma patterns that suggest intentional targeting. Children have been shot with high-calibre bullets, causing massive bodily damage.
The UN children’s agency UNICEF acknowledges the difficulty in providing accurate figures but cites Gaza’s Health Ministry as reporting over 16,000 children injured in Gaza, about 70 every single day since the war began.
The UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA estimates that on average 10 children lose one or both legs daily in Gaza. There are nearly 10,000 cases of war-related disabilities, half of them among children.
According to the British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta, this is the largest group of child amputees in modern history. He noted that the destruction of Gaza’s only prosthetics and rehabilitation centre had forced doctors to perform amputations under siege conditions and severe shortages.
Pregnant women have also faced extreme conditions. At the war’s onset, there were around 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, and most of them have since given birth in unsafe or often fatal conditions for both the mother and child.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded in its March 2025 report that Israel’s systemic use of sexual, reproductive, and gender-based violence in Gaza has irreparably harmed the Palestinians’ reproductive capacity, amounting to two acts of genocide under the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention.
Beyond that, the health crisis in Gaza is staggering. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has reported over 600,000 cases of respiratory infections, 100,000 cases of lice and scabies, 60,000 cases of skin rashes, and 11,000 cases of chickenpox.
The Health Ministry has declared Gaza a polio outbreak zone. Hepatitis infections have reached 40,000, 90 per cent of children suffer from severe food insecurity, and the same percentage of children under five reportedly suffer from at least one infectious disease.
It seems a strategic decision has been made that no one should survive. Gaza’s children and women are locked in a battle for survival. If they are not killed by bombs or bullets, they die from hunger, thirst, or disease. The scale of this devastation suggests a deliberate campaign aimed at mass casualties among children, a grim objective that aligns with Israel’s strategic calculus.
POPULATION REDUCTION AS POLICY: The Zionist movement historically viewed demography as the primary obstacle to establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Racial purity became a national obsession, shaping Israel’s security doctrine and public policy.
In December 1947, first prime minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion declared that a stable Jewish state could not exist unless Jews formed at least 60 per cent of the population. In February 1948, he adopted Plan Dalet, executed in May of that year, which reduced the Palestinian population to below 20 per cent. This demographic reconfiguration became a strategic pillar of Israel’s national security.
In December 2003, present Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed Ben-Gurion, warning that if the Arabs reached 40 per cent of the population of Israel, it would spell the end of the Jewish state. Even 20 per cent Arab representation, he argued, posed an existential dilemma, justifying extreme measures.
Since 1948, Palestinians have understood that demography is a form of resistance. Reproduction became a tool of national survival. Today, Palestinians number seven million within historic Palestine, roughly equal to the Jewish population.
Israeli estimates, including Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) reports in 2021 and 2024 and a Knesset paper in 2018, project that by 2050 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will number 10 million. With 3.2 million Arabs expected in Israel itself, non-Jews will form a clear demographic majority.
This scenario presents a demographic nightmare for Israel. Netanyahu and his far-right allies, under the guise of a war against Hamas, have revived the Plan Dalet logic, systematically reducing Gaza’s population through the direct targeting of women and children.
The US has played an enabling role. Since assuming office in January 2025, US President Donald Trump has offered Israel unequivocal support. One of his first executive orders lifted the ban on exporting 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, which were delivered within three weeks.
Trump then revealed his first “real estate deal” in the region – rebuilding Gaza as a megaproject that would begin by relocating its population to Egypt and Jordan and transforming the Strip into a “Middle Eastern Riviera.”
Palestinian youth resistance is also viewed by Israeli think tanks, including the INSS, as an internal security threat. INSS studies from 2021 and 2023 describe Palestinian youth as an emerging force, particularly in the West Bank, where individual acts of resistance (branded as terrorism) challenge Israel’s control.
In sum, Israel is striving to eliminate future generations of Palestinians by targeting the very groups responsible for them: children and their mothers. It would not be surprising if future disclosures reveal that the recent war on Gaza was merely the execution of a long-conceived fifth version of Plan Dalet, a genocidal blueprint quietly waiting for the right political moment to be implemented.
In Israeli strategic culture, nothing happens by coincidence; every goal is pursued through meticulous long-term planning.
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*The writer is a media and communications adviser and a former practitioner in leading developmental and media institutions.
*This study was first published in the Arab Future Journal by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies.
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