Disgraced CIA director Looks to Cash-In on Gaza Concentration Camps

General David Petraeus heads a U.S. plan to convert the Gaza Strip into a grid of walled-off biometric concentration camps. Will Netanyahu accept it?

Since the first months of the war, retired U.S. Army general and disgraced former CIA director David Petraeus has been leading a push for Israel to turn the Gaza Strip into a series of concentration camps – what he calls “gated communities.”

He has made numerous appearances at think-tank conferences, penned articles, and given interviews to top U.S. foreign policy publications to promote the concept of a counterinsurgency strategy similar to the one that he led in Iraq.

“We’re going to create gated communities – essentially. It’s an accurate description, but with much more effective walls. In fact, we would tell them – I said ‘Look, you know it costs a lot of money to be in a gated community in Florida, and we’re going to give it to you for free here in Fallujah,’” he joked at a September 24 appearance at Rice University’s Baker Institute, eliciting audible laughs from the audience.

Petraeus explained that this would involve transforming the Gaza Strip’s tiny territory into a grid of walled off neighborhoods, cleansed of resistance and accessible to residents only with biometric identification cards that would allow CIA mercenary guardians to identify Hamas members.

“The way we’re going to do this is we’re going to come from the north and go a mile into the territory, put an east-west wall,” he explained. “Do it in a single night, we used to put walls up in many locations that length every single night. Put a couple north-south walls, you have three or four gated communities… And then repeat the process. You cut entry control points in, you control those very carefully, you cut them in from Israel as well.” 

“Rinse and repeat, you just keep doing this,” he said, noting that an even more intensified version would be applied to the densely populated Gaza City. “You're gonna have to slice this up in different ways.”

This would pave the way for an international force to occupy Gaza – what Petraeus calls “peace.”

“If that's done, then you'll see Arab forces willing to come in,” he argued in an October 23 Foreign Policy interview. “You could bring in Palestinian security forces that are trained and equipped by the United States and the Jordanians at the International Police Training center. You'll see NGOs and international organizations in there. And only if there is security can you do what I've laid out, and only then is there a better future for the Palestinian people with the possibility that Palestinians in Gaza can live side by side with their Israeli neighbors in peace.”

Petraeus was more candid in a December 2023 interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.

“There's a lot of talk about an international force that eventually would have Arab participation, initially might be a kind of coalition of the willing: Scandinavian nations, other nations that are prepared to go in, but they're going to need to have very tough rules of engagement. They're going to need to shoot people.”

“Exactly,” Petraeus replied.

While Petraeus portrays the concentration camps as benevolence towards Palestinians, he stands to reap financial benefits from such an arrangement. 

Since 2013, he has been a partner at the behemoth private investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., known as KKR, and is chairman of its Global Institute.

David Petraeus, KKR partner.

KKR financial disclosures show that it has invested heavily in Constellis, which is the private security firm that Mordechai “Moti” Kahana, the Israeli-American owner of Global Delivery Company, who heads the plan, has contracted for design and implementation.

Constellis is the current iteration of the notorious mercenary outfit Blackwater (later renamed Academi) and counts several other similar companies among its assets, including Triple Canopy Olive Group and The Development Initiative, Centerra, AMK9, OMNIPLEX, Strategic Social and Edinburgh International. Its promotional video on Youtube shows an image of the Al-Aqsa compound in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, although there is no evidence that the company is active there.

Source: Youtube/Constellis 

In recent days, Kahana has revealed more details of the plan in a series of interviews.

Speaking to Israeli army radio on October 22, Kahana said that he brought the proposal to the Netanyahu government on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on southern Israel. He later arranged a meeting between Israeli officials and an American general who took part in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, whom he does not identify but is presumably Petreaus.

Counterinsurgency doctrine

Kahane explains that he took the biometric concentration camp concept from the U.S. experience in Iraq, where Petraeus played a leading role.

Indeed, the U.S. military, facing an Iraqi insurgency, walled off neighborhoods in cities including Baghdad, Fallujah, and Ramadi, among others, in order to pacify the population and control territory.

According to former U.S. Marine Matthew Hoh, who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and worked in the State Department and Pentagon, this strategy is called “population control” and is a fundamental aspect of counterinsurgency doctrine. He traces this strategy back to the British occupation of Malaysia and notes how it has failed to achieve its stated goals of stamping out resistance in nearly every case, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ironically, the U.S. leaned on Israel’s expertise honed in its occupation of Palestinian territory. Hoh recalls that Israel provided his company with armored D-9 bulldozers, which were used to create massive dirt berms around Iraqi cities as part of the population control strategy.

Kahane was also sure to portray the concentration camps in the most benevolent light possible.

“It’s not a ghetto, whoever wants to get in or get out, no problem,” he said..” You clean the neighborhood, you just make sure that whoever returns to the neighborhood goes through biometric check, doesn’t carry arms, and this way there is no problem with starting to live normal lives in that neighborhood.”

Kahana reiterated in an interview with the Israeli media outlet Ynet that “very soon all of Gaza will want to look like this.” 

 

‘War addicts’

The man tasked with designing the concentration camp archipelago is Justin Sapp, a recently retired U.S. army colonel whose resumé boasts of leading a CIA paramilitary unit that spearheaded the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. He was repeatedly deployed there and across the Middle East throughout his three decade career before joining the private sector as a consultant for Constellis.

Justin Sapp, on the bottom right, leading a CIA paramilitary Afghanistan in 2001: Reddit

Justin Sapp. Source: Badgersix

By using multiple layers of contractors, there is no mechanism for reporting abuses or crimes, all but guaranteeing legal immunity for the company’ personnel.

“In the military, you have a chain of command through which things can be reported,” Hoh says. “Within contracting companies, there’s no such thing. So the likelihood of anything actually being exposed or known is very limited.”

As for the CIA mercenaries to be sent, Kahana explained that they are all former special forces from the U.S., British, French, and Kurdish militaries. The British will lead, headed by an MI6 figure only identified as “David.” All of them have at least 25 years of experience and are, as he described them, “war addicts.”

‘A new sheriff has arrived’

Asked how his company would respond to attempts to pillage aid from GDC delivery trucks, Kahana said a first team would use crowd-control methods including firing rubber bullets, spraying water, and shooting in the air. If those fail, a second team will be brought in, which he implied will kill Palestinians who resist its authority.

“If something happens, we will convey the message to the residents of Gaza: You don't want to mess with us. They will understand that a new sheriff has arrived in the city,” he boasted before returning to softer language. “But what is important is that there is food, a bakery, and a kindergarten. Let's prepare for the day after in Gaza.”

“They can dress it up and say this is a way of making sure that the insurgents, the terrorists – whatever they want to call them – they can find them and grab them and separate them from the population,” Hoh explained. But the reality is that it’s the way of making sure the population knows that you're in control and you're trying to dominate and subjugate them. That's essentially what the Israelis would be doing here.”

Kahana emphasizes that despite the insistence of top Israeli officials (like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich), Israeli soldiers, who are specialists in “cleaning,” should not be tasked with distributing aid because they are more likely to kill Palestinian civilians. He recalls the February 29th flour massacre when Israeli forces killed at least 112 civilians and injured 760 more as they awaited in the pre-dawn hours to receive food aid.

“The IDF now entered and tried to do it several months ago,” Kahana said.  “And little children – you distribute candies – they jump on those trucks, I’m not talking about the thieves, I’m talking about the citizens, they jump on those trucks, and try to steal the aid for various reasons. Now, what does the IDF do? It defends itself. The IDF defends itself – 100 people were killed, and that’s not good for anybody in the world.”

However, contractors in Iraq were notoriously trigger-happy and carried out grisly killings of civilians. Most famous was the 2007 killing Nisour Square massacre in which Blackwater mercenaries opened fire on a crowded intersection, killing 17 Iraqis.

Former Biden administration official Jeremy Konyndyk, who now is president of Refugees International, criticized the plan in comments given to The Guardian.

“There’s a reason that humanitarians don’t operate this way,” he said. “The US, during the peak ‘war on terror’ era, occasionally experimented with military contractors and this kind of militarized aid delivery, and it was always a disaster… U.S.-funded contractors that took an armed security approach got hit a lot because they were seen as combatants.”

Will Netanyahu agree?

While Petraeus insists that the concentration camp plan is in the interest of Gaza’s Palestinians, he admitted that it benefits Israel, which continues to suffer unprecedented casualties to its enlisted army and reserves, with 771 killed and more than 11,000 injured since Oct. 7, 2023.

“Right now, despite requests from the Israeli Defense Force chief of staff and the minister of defense for such a vision, it has not been forthcoming,” Petraeus remarked at the Rice University event.

Although the Biden administration and top Israeli military figures have, according to Kahana, approved of the concentration camp plan, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains quiet. This is likely due to his desire to avoid any kind of ceasefire, a hidden agenda which even U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has acknowledged. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who are key allies in his coalition, have threatened to pull out and collapse the government if Netanyahu were to agree to a ceasefire. This would jeopardize a 2023 law guaranteeing him legal immunity from numerous corruption charges and could put him behind bars.

Instead of Netanyahu himself publicly rejecting it, low-ranking Likud MK Amit Halevi attacked the foreign-run concentration camp concept as an unacceptable affront to Israeli sovereignty.

“The idea that a foreign entity will be entrusted with our security is national bankruptcy,” he wrote on Telegram. “The introduction of foreign security forces to deal with national security matters in the territories of our homeland will severely damage Israel's sovereignty, set a very dangerous precedent and make it very difficult for the IDF soldiers to deal with the threat that will undoubtedly grow in these places.”

As the Israeli military commits daily massacres and suffers unprecedented casualties with no strategy and no end in sight, its leadership, which is reliant on the U.S., is desperate for an offramp. However, with Netanyahu at the helm, his personal interests appear to come first, spelling a likely quicker doom for the State of Israel.