Israel’s Defense Minister said on Monday that he has instructed the military to prepare plans to force all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp where they will be imprisoned by Israeli soldiers. Minister Israel Katz told reporters that the Israeli government was planning to establish a so-called “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza, on what used to be Rafah until Israel decimated the city. Israel would first force 600,000 Palestinians into the area, and eventually the entire population of over 2 million.
Israel would screen people for entry into the camp, Katz said. If the plans allowed, the camp would be established during a temporary, 60-day ceasefire currently being discussed by the U.S. and other officials. Haaretz reports that the perimeter of the camp would be guarded by the Israeli military, and that Katz says that he is “seeking international partners to manage the zone.”
It’s unclear whether this plan, announced by Katz amid a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, has support from other Israeli ministers. Netanyahu and the U.S. have been collaborating on a plan for the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza, but Haaretz reports that Israeli officials don’t believe that the plan will go forward, and that other countries have not agreed to receive expelled Palestinians.
According to Reuters, the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has prepared a plan to create “Humanitarian Transit Areas” that would effectively constitute large camps to concentrate Palestinians into, supposedly with the goal of “replacing Hamas’ control over the population in Gaza,” the proposal for the plan reads. The plan would be carried out with the goal of advancing U.S. President Donald Trump’s “vision for Gaza,” planning documents say, referring to Trump’s “riviera” plan for the ethnic cleansing of the Strip.
Rights groups and experts have likened GHF’s plan and Katz’s announcement to a “modern-day concentration camp.” “Between this sociopathic proposal and the daily massacres of Palestinians seeking aid, it is now beyond clear that the GHF is nothing more than a U.S.-backed arm of the Israeli government’s efforts to ethnically cleanse and kill as many Palestinians as possible,” said the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Human rights experts have said Katz’s “humanitarian city” plan would be a blatant war crime. “[Katz] laid out an operational plan for a crime against humanity. It is nothing less than that,” Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard told The Guardian. “It is all about population transfer to the southern tip of the Gaza Strip in preparation for deportation outside the Strip.”
“While the government still calls the deportation ‘voluntary,’ people in Gaza are under so many coercive measures that no departure from the strip can be seen in legal terms as consensual,” Sfard went on.
Palestinians have already been crammed into smaller and smaller areas of the Strip, with 85 percent of Gaza under evacuation orders or turned into a fully militarized zone by Israel, according to the UN. Overcrowding, starvation and a lack of water and other basic needs have made these areas effectively uninhabitable.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has said that Palestinians are squeezed into such a small area that there is less space per person in Palestine than is afforded to prisoners in Guantánamo Bay — a prison that is notorious for torture and abuses. “Confining the population between bombing, hunger, and disease on one hand, and preventing them from returning to or even remaining near their destroyed homes on the other, makes it clear that the measures imposed in the Gaza Strip are not a temporary emergency displacement, but part of a permanent and premeditated policy of forced displacement,” the human rights group wrote in a report on Tuesday.
“This policy aims to bring about a comprehensive demographic transformation in the enclave by depopulating it, placing it under full military control, and encircling it with an unprecedented blockade,” Euro-Med Monitor went on.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders sharply criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday as the fugitive from the International Criminal Court met with lawmakers ahead of a second White House meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump to advance plans for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the embattled Gaza Strip. “As President Trump and members of Congress roll out the red carpet for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, let’s remember that Netanyahu has been indicted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court for overseeing the systematic killing and starvation of civilians in Gaza,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement.
“This is the man Trump and Congress are welcoming this week: a war criminal who will be remembered as one of modern history’s monsters,” the senator continued. “His extremist government has killed more than 57,000 Palestinians and wounded almost 135,000, 60% of whom are women, children, or elderly people. The United Nations reports that at least 17,000 children have been killed and more than 25,000 wounded. More than 3,000 children in Gaza have had one or more limbs amputated.”
“At this moment, hundreds of thousands of people are starving after Israel prevented any aid from entering Gaza for nearly three months,” Sanders noted. “In the last six weeks, Israel has allowed a trickle of aid to get in, but has tried to replace the established United Nations distribution system with a private foundation backed by security contractors. This has been a catastrophe, with near-daily massacres at the new aid distribution sites. In its first five weeks in operation, 640 people have been killed and at least 4,488 injured while trying to access food through this mechanism.”
Trump and Netanyahu—who said Monday that he nominated the U.S. president for the Nobel Peace Prize—are expected to discuss ongoing efforts to reach a new deal to secure the release of the 22 remaining Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, as well as plans for giving Gazans what the prime minister described as a “better future” by finding third countries willing to accept forcibly displaced Palestinians.
Critics said such euphemistic language is an attempt to give cover to Israel’s plan to ethnically cleanse and indefinitely occupy Gaza. Observers expressed alarm over Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz’s Tuesday affirmation of a plan to force all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp at the southern tip of the strip.
“There is no such thing as voluntary displacement amongst a population that has been under constant bombardment for nearly two years and has been cut off from essential aid,” Jeremy Konyndyk, president of the advocacy group Refugees International and a former senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, told Reuters.
Most Palestinians are vehemently opposed to what they say would amount to a second Nakba, the forced displacement of more than 750,000 people from Palestine during and after the 1948 establishment of the modern state of Israel. “This is our land,” one Palestinian man, Mansour Abu Al-Khaier, told The Times of Israel on Tuesday. “Who would we leave it to, where would we go?”
Another Gazan, Abu Samir el-Fakaawi, told the newspaper: “I will not leave Gaza. This is my country. Our children who were martyred in the war are buried here. Our families. Our friends. Our cousins. We are all buried here. Whether Trump or Netanyahu or anyone else likes it or not, we are staying on this land.”
Officials at the United Nations—whose judicial body, the International Court of Justice, is weighing a genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa and supported by around two dozen countries—condemned any forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. “This raises concerns with regards to forcible transfer—the concept of voluntary transfers in the context that we are seeing in Gaza right now [is] very questionable,” Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Tuesday.
COMMENTS