The Middle East Eye website said on Monday that there is a growing conviction among Israelis that “the Palestinians are not going anywhere and that one must simply kill them to make them disappear.”

The site refers to the full text of a plan formulated at the end of October 2023 by Gila Gamliel, then the Israeli Minister of Intelligence, to “evacuate the civilian population from Gaza to Sinai.”

The plan received widespread coverage around the world and was seen as evidence that Israel's real goal in its war in Gaza - at that time still in the aerial bombardment phase before a ground invasion - was not to "eliminate Hamas" but to expel the Palestinians from Gaza.

But media coverage in Israel was limited—perhaps because the Intelligence Ministry had no authority (and has since been closed), perhaps because Gamliel had no real political weight, and perhaps because the Israeli media preferred not to deal with Israel’s planned war crimes.

"But after sixteen months, the Gamliel Plan effectively became the official plan of the Israeli government," according to the website.

While many Israelis believe that US President Donald Trump should get the credit for normalizing talk of the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza (and taking control of the Strip) first and foremost, of course, there is no denying that this process reflects the evolution of an idea that the Israeli public has long cherished.

It is noteworthy that even after Trump and his spokesmen began to soften his plan (to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians) in recent days, describing it not as a “forced evacuation” but rather as “only a recommendation,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to extol “President Trump’s groundbreaking plan to allow the freedom of exit for the residents of Gaza” while Defense Minister Israel Katz established an administration for a “voluntary exit” from Gaza.

All of these formulas are found almost verbatim in the Gamliel Plan.

The site refers to Deputy Speaker of Parliament Nissim Vaturi’s call to “separate children and women and kill adults [males] in Gaza.” Vaturi may be a more marginal politician than Gamliel, but he represents an evolution in Israeli Jewish discourse.

Calls for and threats of a second Nakba, which dominated right-wing discourse even before October 7 and have since entered the mainstream routinely by soldiers, officials and citizens, are growing. There is not just the “generals’ plan” for siege and starvation, which has already been implemented with the expulsion of residents of northern Gaza and the demolition of their homes and was only stopped by the ceasefire, but there is now a plan for annihilation: for a final solution to the Gaza problem and the Palestinian problem in general.

It is noteworthy that at the beginning of the war of extermination on Gaza, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was “one of the ways” to deal with Hamas, and such statements are now being heard openly - without any attempt to hide or whitewash them.