Above photo: BCG.
To Expedite Ethnic Cleansing Of Gaza.
The Boston Consulting Group was tasked with estimating the cost of permanently displacing Palestinians from Gaza as part of a ‘post-war reconstruction plan’.
A major US consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), was tasked by Israeli backers to model the costs of “relocating” Palestinians from Gaza as part of a project “imagining” post-war Gaza reconstruction, a Financial Times (FT) investigation published on 5 July revealed.
The complex financial model for the reconstruction of Gaza “included cost estimates for relocating hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the strip and the economic impact of such a mass displacement.”
In one scenario, Palestinians would be provided “voluntary relocation” packages valued at $9,000 per person, or $5 billion total. Each person would reportedly receive $5,000 in cash, subsidized rent for four years, and subsidized food for a year.
The model estimated that 500,000 Palestinians, a quarter of the strip’s population, would leave and that “three-quarters of those relocated would never return,” FT added.
The BCG team did not design the postwar plan for Gaza that it financially modeled, several people familiar with the exercise said.
The FT report does not specify what locations outside of Gaza Palestinians would be displaced to. Israeli leaders have previously pressured Egypt’s government to receive vast numbers of Palestinians from Gaza.
BCG has come under scrutiny for its role in establishing the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF), a US-Israeli organization that displaced the UN and international NGOs as the leading provider of aid to the strip.
Haaretz reported on 26 June that Israeli soldiers were receiving direct orders to shoot unarmed Palestinians seeking food aid at GHF distribution points, even when no threat was present.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, over 600 Palestinians have been killed near GHF distribution sites since 27 May.
The project to model the economic costs of displacing Palestinians from Gaza is part of a larger effort to ethnically cleanse the strip and allow real estate developers to profit from its reconstruction.
Earlier this year, US President Donald Trump suggested cleansing Gaza of its 2.2 million residents so it could be transformed and rebuilt as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Trump’s special envoy to the region and point man for cease-fire negotiations with Hamas is Steve Witkoff, the founder and chairman of the Witkoff Group, a New York real estate development firm.
The US president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is also a prominent New York real estate developer through his family business, Kushner Companies.
In March, Kushner described the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s waterfront property. He suggested Israel should remove Palestinians while it “cleans up” the strip.
On 13 October 2023, just days after the Israeli genocide in Gaza began, Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence issued a document recommending the occupation of Gaza and the total transfer of its 2.3 million inhabitants to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
The leaked document recommended that Israel expel the Palestinian population of Gaza to Sinai during the war, establish tent cities and new cities in northern Sinai to accommodate the deported population, and then create a closed security zone stretching several kilometers inside Egypt.
According to a right-wing activist, the document from the Ministry of Intelligence was leaked by a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. Leaking the document was an attempt to find out whether “the public in Israel is ready to accept ideas of a transfer from Gaza,” the activist told Mekomit Magazine.
