By Dan Cohen – Oct 22, 2024
A private intelligence corporation billed as “Uber for war zones” is preparing to create what Israel hopes will be the model for supplanting Hamas rule in Gaza.
The Biden administration has approved the deployment of 1,000 CIA-trained private mercenaries as part of a joint U.S.-Israeli plan to turn Gaza’s apocalyptic rubblescape into a high-tech dystopia.
Starting with Al-Atatra, a village in the northwestern Gaza Strip, the plan calls to build what the Israeli daily Ynet calls “humanitarian bubbles” – turning the remains of villages and neighborhoods into tiny concentration camps cut off from their environs and surrounded and controlled by mercenaries.
This comes as Israel carries out daily massacres and ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, enacting the proposal known as The Generals’ Plan, originally crafted by former national security chief Giora Eiland to turn Gaza into “a place where no human being can exist.”
The plan, approved by White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, calls for the Israeli military to clear out pockets of Palestinian resistance, which it has failed to achieve, demonstrated by the recent killing of Israeli Colonel Ehasn Daksa, the highest ranking officer to lose his life in the year long war.
48 hours after stamping out resistance, they plan to erect separation walls around the neighborhood, forcing its residents, and no one else, to enter and exit using biometric identification under the CIA contractors’ control. Those who do not accept the biometric regime would be refused humanitarian aid.
This plan, first reported by Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar, allocates $90 million for the residents to rebuild their homes, and calls to appoint a “local sheikh” to the position of “head of the council.”
The plan is a 21st century reboot of Washington’s infamous, failed Strategic Hamlet Program during its war in Vietnam in the 1960s, updated with a modern biometric program the US military-industrial complex has incorporated into its operations since, in particular, the beginning of the so-called “War or Terror.” (The U.S. has even created a little known agency called the Defense Forensics and Biometrics Agency to advance this).
‘Uber for war zones’
The company at the forefront of this plan is called Global Delivery Company, described in its promotional materials as a “Uber for war zones.” Israeli-American businessman Moti Kahana owns it and employs several top Israeli and American military intelligence officials, including retired U.S. Navy Captain Michael Durnan, retired U.S. Special Forces captain Justin Sapp, former Israeli military intelligence division head Yossi Kuperwasser, and former Israeli military chief intelligence officer David Tzur.
Kahana has played a key role in the dirty war against Syria in the 2010s and worked with the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army to provide food and medical care to militants and civilians alike. GDC has also been involved in Ukraine, where it collaborated with the Zionist organization, the American Joint Distribution Committee, to operate a refugee camp in Romania near its border with Ukraine. He has also been in negotiations to free the former Israeli military intelligence officer Elizabeth Tsurkov, who was detained in Iraq in 2023.
Kahana’s Gaza plan has been in the works since at least February, 2024. He presented the plan to establish these electronic cantons – what Jewish News referred to as “gated communities” – to the White House, State Department, and Defense Department, as well as Netanyahu. U.S. officials did not respond. While the Israeli military had agreed, the Israeli prime minister shot it down. “What’s the rush?” he quipped.
The Israeli military has also been in talks with Kahana to deploy its mercenaries to secure the Netzarim corridor, which bisects the Gaza Strip.
The GDC’s CIA mercenaries would be in full control of humanitarian aid, thereby supplanting Hamas and ending its governance, they figure, achieving a long-term goal of the Israeli war.
“If the pilot goes through successfully, it will be the model for the rehabilitation of Gaza and will result in the suppression of Hamas’s civilian control in the Strip,” notes Eldar.
Pentagon Confirms US Troops To Operate THAAD Missile Defense in ‘Israel’
The plan resembles a proposal published in the U.S. Department of Defense’s top journal, written by Likudnik think tanker Omer Dostri, who was appointed as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesperson in August 2024.
As I reported at the time, Dostri’s plan laid out four options for Gaza’s future: 1) an installed collaborator regime, 2) the renewal of Palestinian Authority administration, 3) an international or regional mandate in Gaza, or 4) a long-term direct Israeli military occupation, which he described as the optimal choice.
However, as Hamas has maintained its civil control throughout Gaza and Israel has failed to defeat armed resistance groups, the Netanyahu government is relying on the U.S. to do its bidding.
The latest plan appears to be a combination of various elements from Dostri’s paper, involving a long-term Israeli military occupation in combination with an international mandate. While the proposal called for the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia to assume civilian control over the Gaza Strip, that has failed to materialize, prompting the United States to approve deployment of CIA contractors.
While Israel has forced thousands of Palestinian civilians to march south, Gaza’s still formidable armed resistance may stifle these plans.
Dan Cohen
Dan Cohen is a journalist and co-producer of the award-winning documentary, Killing Gaza. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine, Latin America, the US-Mexico border and Washington DC. Follow him on Twitter at @DanCohen3000.
