On 26 February 2025, Fox News headlined “Trump posts AI video of Gaza as luxury resort”, which showed clips from a promotional video that Trump had had done to show how he would like Gaza to be after the Gazans are eliminated from there and replaced by a world-class tropical beach-resort on the Mediterranean Sea.
Encyclopedia Britannica has an article “Natural Gas in the Gaza Strip” (updated to 15 May 2025), which says:
Natural gas reserves were discovered about 20 miles (35 km) offshore the Gaza Strip in 2000. The reserves, located within the maritime boundaries allocated to the Palestinian Authority (PA) under the bilateral Oslo Accords between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, were a key discovery for the still nascent Palestinian governing body, which was eager to establish a viable and independent economy. Although the Gaza Marine natural gas field, with an estimated 1.1 trillion cubic feet (32 billion cubic meters) of natural gas, is modest compared with some regional giants, the reserve far exceeds the energy needs of both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Its development, which the PA originally licensed to BG Group and CCC Group, offered the PA a path to self-sufficiency in energy and greater economic development through exports. After Royal Dutch Shell PLC purchased BG Group in 2016, the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF), the PA’s sovereign wealth fund, acquired its interest.
The Gaza Marine field remains unexploited because of the difficulty attracting the investment to develop it. The primary limiting factor is the size of the PA’s domestic market: Its energy consumption is too small to offset the cost of developing the field, which is estimated to be at least $800 million and could potentially be much more. Since the Oslo peace process was intended to bring peace and cooperation between the Israelis and the Palestinians, it was initially assumed that Israel would buy natural gas from the PA and add significantly to its return on investment. But the discovery of the natural gas reserves in 2000 coincided with the outbreak of the second intifada (2000–05). The hostility between Israel and the PA derailed the Oslo peace process, and discussions for a contract for natural gas did not get far. After the 2006 elections for the PA led to a unity government with Hamas,
And, so, of course, Israeli and American billionaires will be reluctant to develop it unless Israel will have taken it. Eliminating the Gazans would enormously increase its market-value. But that gas field isn’t the only one that would be affected by Israel’s expansion to include all of the lands that the Jewish and Christian Bibles say God gave to “the Jews”:
Genesis 15:18-21
“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt [the Nile] to the great river, the Euphrates, including the lands of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amoriotes, the Caananites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’”
That’s the basis of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine and parts of Lebanon and Syria; and, furthermore, in Deuteronomy 7:1-2, 7:16, and 20:16-18 (and other passages), ‘God’ demanded Jews to exterminate all of the non-Jewish residents there. Many Jewish, Christian, and some other billionaires, agree with Hitler that the Bible is the “Monumental History of Mankind”; and, so, Israel’s taking those lands is, from the Biblical standpoint, right, and not merely a potentially quite profitable thing to do. It would certainly increase considerably the marketability to investors, of those gas fields, especially because throughout the U.S.-Israel-UK empire, Hamas is demonized (and therefore would, from the Biblical standpoint, be very embarrassing for those investors to be partnering with).
On 28 August 2019, UNCTAD, UN Trade and Development, had issued “The unrealized potential of Palestinian oil and gas reserves”, and reported:
Geologists and resources economists have confirmed that the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) lies above sizeable reservoirs of oil and natural gas wealth, in Area C of the West Bank and the Mediterranean coast off the Gaza Strip, according to a recent UNCTAD study.
New discoveries of natural gas in the Levant Basin are in the range of 122 trillion cubic foot while recoverable oil is estimated at 1.7 billion barrels, according to the study entitled “The Economic Cost of Occupation for the Palestinian People: The Unrealized Oil and Natural Gas Potential.”
This offers an opportunity to distribute and share about US$524 billion among the different parties in the region and promote peace and cooperation among old belligerents, the study notes.
These funds could finance socioeconomic development in the oPt as part of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
However, so far the Palestinian people have been prohibited from exploiting the oil and gas reserves in their own land and water to meet their energy needs and generate fiscal and export revenues. …
On 21 July 2015, The Electronic Intifada had headlined “Israel exploits Syrian chaos to plan looting of Golan oil”, concerning Lebanon, instead of Gaza, and opened:
According to Geoff Rochwarger, CEO of Afek, energy independence is the new Zionism.
The Afek oil and gas exploration company has almost completed its second drilling test in the Golan Heights, a part of Syria which Israel has occupied since 1967 and annexed in violation of international law.
The test is part of a three-year program to see if hydrocarbons in the area could lead to oil or gas for Israel.
Israel is fuel-poor and its domestic energy woes could be eased in the interim if the government progresses on deals in relation to the Tamar and Leviathan gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea.
In addition, Israel is now taking advantage of the chaos in Syria to look for precious resources to extract from the occupied Golan Heights.
Israel relies heavily on imports to meet its energy consumption, and with frequent vicissitudes with its neighbors, its need for energy resources continues to shape the nature of its occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, as well as the Golan Heights.
With the Syrian government in disarray, Israeli authorities gave the go-ahead to Afek, a subsidiary of Genie Oil and Gas, to conduct drilling in 10 wells in the occupied Golan Heights in their search for fossil fuels.
According to Howard Jonas, chairman and CEO of Genie Energy Limited, the parent company of Genie Oil and Gas, the company’s team of experts believes that what lies under the Golan Heights could make Israel energy independent and “contribute to the diversification of the free world’s energy supply away from a crippling dependence on unfriendly sources” (see the Genie Energy annual report for 2014).
“Kill them all”
Genie Oil and Gas has some high profile investors and advisors: Media baron Rupert Murdoch, former US Vice President Dick Cheney, American hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt and British investment banker Jacob Rothschild are all members of the company’s “Strategic Advisory Board.”
Murdoch stated in 2013 that “Israel is the greatest ally of democracy in a region beset with turmoil and radicalism.” This was an audacious statement given his investment in a company breaking the basic tenets of international law.
The chairman of Genie Israel, Effie Eitam, who lives in the Golan Heights settlement of Nov, is a former military commander and member of the National Religious Party. He once referred to Palestinian citizens of Israel as a “ticking bomb” causing a “cancer” in Israel. He also told The New Yorker in 2004, that Palestinians were “creatures who came out of the depths of darkness” adding that “we will have to kill them all” before backpeddling slightly: “I know it’s not very diplomatic. I don’t mean all the Palestinians, but the ones with evil in their heads.”
Afek claims on its website that Syria’s occupied Golan Heights is part of the “State of Israel.” The company was granted a petroleum exploration license by the northern regional planning and building committee, in direct violation of international law by completely ignoring the Annex to the Fourth Geneva Convention — which applies to the occupied territory.
In February, an Afek subsidiary started drilling its first exploratory well and drilled to a depth of 1,000 meters. The samples extracted are now undergoing analysis and drilling continues. In the event that the company finds oil, it will request the required licenses to begin the production stage.
There are grave breaches of international law as well as environmental concerns at play here. Firstly, the type of oil expected in the area may not be in liquid form and could require fracking — a process that involves injecting large amounts of scarce water and toxic chemicals into the ground in order to force the hydrocarbons to the surface.
Whether it is conventional oil or shale oil, fracking or drilling could lead to oil seepage into the underground water table, polluting Lake Tiberias — the biblical Sea of Galilee — potentially rendering local water supplies undrinkable and destroying the ecosystem for generations to come.
Looting Syria’s resources
The Golan plateau was occupied by Israel during the 1967 War. UN Security Council resolution 242 and several other resolutions since have called for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territory and condemned Israel’s actions there.
These have included: annexation and imposition of Israeli law in 1981, an action the UN Security Council declared “null and void.” Israel has also transfered its own population into the area for the purpose of colonization and the use of the territory’s resources for its own economic interests.
Imperialists always steal — that is what imperialism is.
Whether America is part of Israel’s empire, or instead Israel is part of America’s empire, is not yet entirely clear, but in the following excerpt — an excellent brief summary of the history here — from a recent speech by Jeffrey Sachs, both possibilities amount much to the same things: gargantuan international theft, by that empire (irrespective of where its center is):
