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Exposed – How the UAE Became Central to Gaza’s Concentration Camp Plot

By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | January 27, 2026

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a key player in the current Gaza Ceasefire and, as Israel’s primary Gulf partner, is proposing major investments in the besieged coastal territory. While the Emiratis portray their role as purely humanitarian, it being the top aid donor since the beginning of the genocide, a much more insidious plot is in fact afoot.

Emirati influence in the Gaza Strip did not begin following October 7, 2023, and has not been limited to humanitarian aid missions. As the leading Arab member nation of the US’s “Abraham Accords”, the UAE exercises considerable power on the political, intelligence, economic, and military levels.

Often, the UAE-Gaza relationship is portrayed as purely humanitarian; the evidence used to suggest this is the $1.8 billion in aid spent on the territory in just over two years. While all the donated humanitarian supplies have certainly been crucial to the population’s survival, a famine was still declared, and the most vulnerable segments of society began to both fall ill and die as a result of the lack of assistance. This was due to Israel’s total blockade for three months, during which flights—both commercial and reportedly military—continued between the UAE and Israel.

While the lack of aid cannot be blamed directly on the UAE, it is largely underreported that, by proxy, Abu Dhabi does share guilt in the suffering of the civilian population in Gaza and seeks to further involve itself in plots designed to torment the Palestinian people.

In May of 2024, after the Israeli military invaded Rafah, closing off the crossing between Egypt and Gaza, the occupying military began forming a group of ISIS-linked gangsters and hardline Salafists, working with them to loot aid entering the Gaza Strip. The first of the groups, led by the now deceased Yasser Abu Shabab, was for months used by Israel to steal humanitarian aid and drip-feed it onto the black market, making it so that the population began to starve.

Later that same year, the Yasser Abu Shabab aid-looting gangs, who worked under Israeli protection and the watch of the occupying military, underwent a facelift and were disingenuously portrayed in the Western corporate media as a grassroots anti-Hamas force. Following the ceasefire that began in January of 2025 and was later violated by Israel in March, these ISIS-linked aid-looting militants returned to the scene in Israeli-supplied tactical gear and began calling themselves the “Popular Forces”.

Then came what was called the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF) privatized aid scheme, which is where the UAE comes into the picture. The GHF transformed into a catastrophe, as Private Military Contractors (PMCs) lured starving Palestinians to aid sites to be gunned down en masse. Well over 2,000 civilians were killed by what they would label a “death trap”.

What many are unaware of is that part of the GHF conspiracy was to use this aid mechanism as a means of mass displacing at least 600,000 Palestinians into a gated concentration camp facility built on the ruins of Rafah. Not only would the GHF’s trigger-happy PMCs be used to support this project, but the ISIS-linked “Popular Forces” death squad, now transformed into an Israeli proxy against Hamas, would police this concentration camp.

Before the GHF’s emergence on the scene, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had reportedly instructed his military to begin the construction of the proposed concentration camp, designed to transfer around 600,000 civilians then living in the Mawasi area.

The United Arab Emirates, under the guise of its “Operation Gallant Knight 3” (al-Faris al-Shahm), which is sold as a purely humanitarian mission, just so happened to coincidentally have been building water desalination facilities in Egypt’s al-Arish, right along the Gaza border.

Emirati state-owned media reported as early as January 2024 that the UAE had built six such water facilities on the Egyptian border, capable of supplying around 600,000 people in Gaza. A real coincidence, considering that the Emiratis just so happened to have prepared the infrastructure for such a concentration camp well before Israel had even publicly proposed it.

When Israel began openly proposing the new concentration camp in Rafah in 2025, before the ceasefire, the UAE openly pledged to help provide water to the new planned “community” in southern Gaza.

This project quickly began to collapse; then came the ceasefire and the dissolution of the infamous GHF. However, the Israelis didn’t give up on their ISIS-linked proxies and instead began creating even more groups, now reaching a total of five separate anti-Hamas militias. It wasn’t long before information started leaking regarding a UAE role in aiding these ISIS-linked groups, which now exist behind Gaza’s so-called “Yellow Line” in the territory that the Israeli military currently controls.

On January 21 of this year, Drop Site News revealed that leaked documents it had seen detailed a plot to construct a new “Planned Community” in Rafah, presented as what the article labeled an “Israeli Panopticon”. On January 23, The Guardian then released a new bombshell piece of information on this “planned community”—set to be built in Israeli-occupied territory as part of the alleged “reconstruction” component of the Gaza ceasefire—the United Arab Emirates is planning to bankroll it.

The likelihood of such a concentration camp facility successfully being constructed on the ruins of Rafah, capable of housing 600,000 people, is still in question—especially given the fact that the attempt to construct a similar model failed before the latest ceasefire. Yet, the mere fact that the Israelis and Emiratis can demonstrably be shown to have been preparing to supply such a community with water, only months into the genocide, is striking.

In addition to its role in backing ISIS-linked death squads in Gaza and supporting the construction of a concentration camp “community” in Rafah, the UAE also provided an economic and logistical lifeline to Israel during its genocide.

Abu Dhabi’s trade ties with Tel Aviv during the genocide escalated, despite occasional Emirati statements of condemnation against Israeli war crimes. A 21% surge in trade occurred in 2025, for example, an increase on the record $3.2 billion in bilateral trade of 2024, during which the Israelis inflicted a man-made famine in Gaza.

Amid mass international airline cancellations and carriers refusing to fly to Israel, the Emiratis continued flights regardless and played a key role as a transit route for Israelis. Dubai even became the top holiday destination for Israelis last year, including for countless Israeli soldiers who were deployed in Gaza.

The key regional diplomatic lifeline for Israel throughout the genocide has been the UAE. In addition to this, the trade corridor created by the Emiratis to aid the Israelis enabled them to survive and partially circumvent the damage caused by the siege imposed on the Red Sea by Yemen’s Ansarallah.

Abu Dhabi also collaborates with the Israelis on their broader foreign policy objectives, including in the construction of an airbase in Somaliland, in Yemen’s Socotra Island, and beyond. The UAE-Israeli alliance is present in the Horn of Africa, across West Asia and North Africa, interfering in the internal affairs of countless nations. They also collaborate on projects to isolate and attack the Muslim Brotherhood, in addition to funding joint anti-Islam propaganda projects.

Then there is the UAE’s role in using the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s former Preventive Security Force head, Mohammed Dahlan, to not only command various initiatives across multiple continents but to push specific agendas in the Gaza Strip, and even the West Bank to a lesser degree.

The High Representative for Gaza in Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” (BoP) is none other than Nickolay Mladenov, who resides in the UAE and in 2021 became the director-general of the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi. Mladenov is also a Segal Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP)—often described as the think tank arm of the Israel Lobby in the US.

Hiding behind the cover of being Gaza’s “top humanitarian aid donor,” the UAE has managed to work hand in hand with Israel in its projects to destroy the Palestinian people and their cause for statehood.

– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.

January 27, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, UAE, Zionism