On July 24, an article appeared in The Wall Street Journal under the name of Yasser Abu Shabab, an infamous gang leader reportedly backed and armed by Israel who has been leading hundreds of gunmen in looting aid trucks passing through southern Gaza’s Rafah area. Despite reports that Abu Shabab is illiterate, the article allegedly written by him says that his so-called “Popular Forces” control large parts of eastern Rafah, which is being prepared to receive displaced Palestinians.
That the WSJ ran the article is unsurprising. But what was most notable about it was what it revealed about Abu Shabab’s involvement in an Israeli plan to “concentrate” Gaza’s population inside a “humanitarian city” to be built over the ruins of Rafah. Recent reports also suggest that the United Arab Emirates may be involved in this project, providing infrastructure and services to the concentration camp.
Toward the end of the WSJ article, the role of Abu Shabab’s group in all this became clear: the “Popular Forces” was preparing the area under its control in eastern Rafah to receive 600,000 displaced Palestinians from across Gaza.
Remember that 600,000 figure.
It isn’t the first time this number has appeared. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz outlined a plan to build a “closed zone” on the border between eastern Rafah and Egypt that is meant to house 600,000 Palestinians. Katz has reportedly instructed the Israeli army to build this concentration camp during a prospective 60-day ceasefire, and it would see the forcible relocation of Palestinians from the coastal “safe zone” of al-Mawasi to the flattened remains of Rafah.
This plan has drawn widespread international condemnation, regarding the proposed forcible transfer of civilians as a war crime and a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute.
One of the organizations likely to be responsible for the distribution of “aid” to this concentration camp is already well-known: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has become infamous for running “death traps” under the guise of distributing food, where aid massacres have killed over 1,000 people, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
But a lesser-known co-conspirator in Israel’s concentration camp scheme appears to be the UAE. The UAE’s role in the scheme is tied to an ongoing operation codenamed “Gallant Knight 3” (al-Faris al-Shahm).
Since April 2025, the Israeli army has been carrying out a wide-scale demolition operation in eastern Rafah, including the destruction of approximately 28,600 buildings. Reports confirm that over 90 percent of Rafah’s residential neighborhoods have been razed to the ground, including the neighborhoods of al-Jneina, Tal al-Sultan, the Saudi neighborhood, and others.
Those are the areas where the concentration camp will presumably be built, and Abu Shabab’s “Popular Forces” would run “security” over it as an Israeli proxy, controlling the Palestinian population in the zone. But security control alone is not sufficient. The concentration camp requires infrastructure, water, and food. This is where the UAE comes in.
Under Operation Gallant Knight 3, the UAE has established six water desalination plants in Egypt’s al-Arish, right on the border with Gaza. According to reports from UAE state-controlled media, the combined production capacity of these plants is approximately 1.2 million gallons per day — enough to serve over 600,000 people, the reports say — and will be pumped into the Gaza Strip.
The appearance of this same figure — 600,000 people — in the WSJ article, the Israeli Defense Minister’s statements, and the UAE’s service projection does not appear to be a coincidence.
The UAE will be providing ‘humanitarian’ services to a concentration camp
Operation Gallant Knight was ordered by the UAE’s Sheikh Muhammad bin Zayed al-Nahyan in November 2023, shortly after the war on Gaza began. Its stated aim was to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza and to provide infrastructure like desalination plants to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in the Strip. Over the past week, the operation has also included aid drops over Gaza as part of the “Birds of Goodness” airlift, an initiative the UAE has carried out in cooperation with Jordan.
But the most recent plan to supply desalinated water to southern Gaza marks a clear level of coordination with Israeli military objectives in Gaza. The UAE has chosen the same area identified by the Israeli army for its designated “humanitarian zone.” It is also the same area occupied by Abu Shabab and his armed group.
The UAE will provide the water, Abu Shabab will provide “security,” and the GHF may possibly be the organization tapped to distribute “aid.” Palestinians are already being pressured to head to southern Gaza, where they are promised that they will find food, water, and safety.
What happens to the rest of the Gaza Strip’s population not part of those 600,000?
Reports by the United Nations and human rights organizations have documented that civilians who remained in northern or central Gaza, or in areas not designated as “humanitarian,” were subjected to intense shelling, deprivation of food and medical supplies, and home demolitions.
This is the message Israel seeks to deliver through its various and repeated evacuation orders: those who obey may be allowed to reach the humanitarian zones, only to be later targeted. Those who remain are subjected to torture, arrest, deportation to prisons in the Negev or inside Israel, or killed in front of their families with their homes demolished over their heads.
Re Thomas Ellenberg: “OMG, I totally forgot that. And the only sub district in Palestine which had a Jewish majority was Jaffa.”
FYI, Jaffa was the largest Arab city in Palestine, with a population estimated at 70,000 Arabs and 30,000 Jews. It was turned into a Jewish one by a terrorist named Menachim Begin and the Irgun. He employed 3 inch mortars to drive the Palestinians into the sea. That was all filmed by Pàthe and even shown on newsreels at the time.
On 30th of April 1948 the British High Commissioner advised withdrawing his forces from Jerusalem, before they were cutoff from the sea. He sent a telegram to the Secretary of State and copies to Washington, Damascus, Beirut, Bagdad, Jedda, Malta, and the Commander-in-Chief of the UK Mediterranean Fleet:
“Recent Jewish military successes (if indeed operations based on the mortaring of terrified women and children can be classed as such) have aroused extravagant reactions in the Jewish press, and among the Jews themselves a spirit of arrogance which blinds them to future difficulties and, perhaps clouds their vision of affairs outside Palestine. Jewish broadcasts, both in content and in manner of delivery, are remarkably like those of Nazi Germany. Jewish papers claim that the Haganah controls Haifa, imposes curfews, and decides on what term the Arabs may or may not live in the town; On the roads, Haganah armoured cars are increasingly impudent and intrusive; And in the plains areas Jewish settlers begin to domineer the local Fellahin.
At the same time Chaim Weizmann advised the US State Department (Dean Rusk and Robert Lovett) that the Arab states posed zero military threat.
The Ad Hoc Committes of the UN General Assembly noted that even with the ports of Acre, Jaffa, and Gaza the bulk of the revenue generating Arab properties had been included in the territory of the “Jewish” (Arab majority populated) state. So the Partition Plan for Economic Union always required compulsory revenue in order for the Arab state to ever be viable. Note the State Department already explained the Arab State could never be viable even with revenue sharing due to interconnected roads, communications, irrigation, and lack of natural resources.
That was before the State Department advised Jewish Agency aggression was already happening and territorial aggrandizement would occur. The Secuity Council knew they were not the victims, but they would claim they were and capture Jaffa, Acre, and the Negev.
You are describing just one crime spree that has gone unchecked for over 100 years. The UAE and the USA are participants who are pouring billions of dollars into that joint criminal enterprise, e.g. See CAIR: The ICJ Dismissed Sudan’s Genocide Case Against the UAE. US District Judge Nancy Torresen issued a preliminary injunction on July 18, 2025, temporarily blocking the enforcement of President Trump’s February 2025 executive order authorizing sanctions against individuals working with the ICC.
Both the USA and Israel were instrumental in authoring the Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950. Those principles explicitly stated that personal criminal responsibility attaches to crimes regardless of the content of municipal law, and obeying superior orders is not a legal defense. So the prosecution of a Hitler or Trump will never depend upon their municipal executive orders, statutes, or their corrupt national judicial rulings.
The author should “put the horse in front of the cart” in this narrative. Article 19 of The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) ensures that legal obligations are not undermined by reservations that would fundamentally alter the treaty’s core aims. The VCLT was a codification of the centuries old “Law of Nations”. The US Constitution’s “law of nations clause” is found in Article I, Section 8, Clause 10. It grants Congress the power to “define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations”. It only permitted Congress power to set punishments for violations of the Law of Nations, but those laws were always determined jointly by international consensus.
Why are we even discussing this problem, when the Palestinians are the subject of ICJ and ICC charges of illegal occupation, eviction, apartheid, extermination, and starvation? The UAE and the USA are actors in that “Situation” that has been investigated ever since 2014! The others, including Sudan have been investigated and subject to obstruction of justice, extortion, and blackmail too throughout that period. They are committing elements of well defined crimes in the territory of the State of Palestine, a party to the UN Convention on Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations, the ICJ Statute, and the Rome Statute. Trump sent $15 billion in arms to Israel in just the first three months of his administration alone.
Apartheid Part 4
Americans never realize the racist shell game our government employs using shopworn or deprecated definitions for terms like “plenary power” and “sovereignty” that never did allow our government to unilaterally abrogate our legal undertakings or obligations in treaties between the USA and other “nations”. The Law of Nations held “No one is judge in his own case” (Nemo judex in causa sua) and “Agreements must be kept” (pacta sunt servanda).
When we look at a map of “Israel”, there is no West Bank and Gaza for exactly the same reason our maps don’t bother to show “Native American”, “Mexican”, or “Insular” territories that comprise the US regions that we employ to conceal our crimes of apartheid and genocide on the other inhabitants. The Jay Treaty of 1794 was never signed by the Haudenosaunee Confederation Nation. It destroyed their territorial integrity, imposed racial blood quantum on their heirs, and travel restrictions through their own lands that treated them as aliens. Blood quantums are not applied to “white persons.” They are only employed to libel property or estates of people or heirs of those accused of having “one drop” of non-white blood (a bill of attainder). We need to examine how, and why, B’nai B’rith avoided those same problems when other stateless, tribal, and racial groups never could.
Our government denies the reality that they are the nations, peoples and cultures that have existed and been colonized by “whites” ever since the last Ice Age. “We” supposedly get rights in this shell game (but no legal standing or right of private action), while try do not. Only “states” are entitled to “representation”. Even when we “recognize” them, we simply move the goal posts and deny them “sovereignty”. The Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision, declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883. Reasoning that the Fourteenth Amendment granted Congress the power to regulate the behavior of states, not individuals. Thus, the Act, which aimed to prevent discrimination by private businesses and individuals, was deemed beyond the scope of Congress’s authority under the Fourteenth Amendment. See: Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857); United States ex rel. Standing Bear v. Crook; Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553 (1903); United States v. Omaha Tribe of Indians, 253 U.S. 275 (1920); United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980).