‘Manifestly illegal’: In Katz’s plan for Gaza ‘humanitarian city,’ experts see war crime

Defense Minister Israel Katz’s proposal to build a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of the southern Gazan city of Rafah and to transfer the entire Gaza civilian population there has elicited massive criticism both from within Israel and abroad.

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said such a city would constitute a “concentration camp,” while leading Israeli experts on international law have warned implementation of the plan would constitute a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity and could lead to a form of genocide.

The Wall Street Journal reported that IDF military lawyers have told IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir that the plan would be illegal if it involved coercing Palestinian civilians into the zone and preventing them from leaving.

What is Katz’s plan?

In a briefing to reporters last week, Katz said he had instructed the IDF and the Defense Ministry to advance plans for a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah.

According to Katz’s vision, the entire civilian population of Gaza — more than 2 million people — would eventually be confined to this zone.

Palestinians entering the city would be screened to ensure that Hamas operatives do not gain access, and no one would be allowed to leave, Katz said.

The defense minister also emphasized that it was his ambition to encourage Palestinians to “voluntarily emigrate” from the Gaza Strip to other countries.

A security cabinet meeting Sunday attended by Katz, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and other senior ministers and defense officials saw discussions held on implementing the plan. At the meeting, IDF officials were reported to estimate it would take a year to build and cost as much as NIS 20 billion ($5.9 billion).

According to Hebrew media reports, Netanyahu responded angrily to the time frame and cost presented by the military, and told the officials to present a more “realistic” proposal.

“It needs to be shorter, cheaper and more practical,” Netanyahu said at the meeting, according to Ynet.

Forced movement and international law

The Fourth Geneva Convention and customary international law prohibit in general the “mass forcible transfer” and deportation of a civilian population, although they allow for evacuations for the security of that population or for “imperative military reasons.”

The Geneva Convention also stipulates that such evacuations must be temporary, stating that any evacuated people must be transferred back to their homes “as soon as hostilities in the area in question have ceased.”

If evacuations are carried out, proper accommodation must be provided to the civilian population, and the evacuations must be carried out “in satisfactory conditions of hygiene, health, safety and nutrition.”

In addition, the Rome Statute, which is the founding document of the International Criminal Court (ICC), lists “unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement” as war crimes, and “deportation or forcible transfer of population” as crimes against humanity.

Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute and argues that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over its nationals. The issue is currently under review at the ICC itself, in the wake of the court’s decision to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant last year.

A stark warning

Last week, 16 Israeli scholars and lecturers at Israeli law faculties wrote a letter to Katz and Zamir, with copies sent to the attorney general and others, to warn against “the clear and explicit illegality inherent in the plan to concentrate the population of Gaza.”

Implementing it, they said, would constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The letter was signed by, among others, Eyal Benvenisti, formerly of Cambridge University, who was one of the experts who defended Israel in the genocide case brought against it by South Africa at the International Court of Justice.

Other prominent signatories were Yuval Shany of Hebrew University’s Faculty of Law, who has filed amicus briefs in defense of Israel at the ICC, as well as David Kretzmer, Eliav Lieblich, Tamar Megiddo, and others.

In their letter, the legal experts pointed out the planned evacuations were not from any specific area of hostilities in Gaza but from the entire territory, calling into question the “imperative military necessity” of the plan. They also stressed that no “legitimate consideration of protection or military necessity” had been presented to justify the plan.

The Israeli academics also stated that the state of infrastructure in Rafah, which has essentially been razed to the ground during the war, is insufficient to provide minimum humanitarian or hygienic conditions for even the 600,000 persons Israel would initially seek to relocate to the zone.

They further noted that Katz had said that encouraging “voluntary emigration” of the Gaza population out of the territory was a specific part of his plan.

This would violate the stipulations in the Geneva Convention that evacuated persons be allowed to return to their homes as quickly as possible. It may also undermine any claim that might be made that the evacuations or deportations to the humanitarian city are designed for the safety of the civilian population or are an imperative military necessity.

“In our view, should this plan materialize, it would not be an evacuation in the legal sense, but rather the establishment of a mass detention camp, the primary purpose of which is ethnic cleansing and expulsion,” the academics wrote.

They said that Katz’s plan would therefore constitute the crimes against humanity of deportation or forcible transfer, severe deprivation of physical liberty, and persecution of an identifiable group under the Rome Statute.

“In addition, there is a high risk that, given the dismal humanitarian conditions in Gaza, and specifically if the population is pushed into a small area, the crime of extermination could materialize due to the likely creation of living conditions leading to the destruction of part of the population,” the academics added.

The academics also warned that the “concentration of civilians under extreme density and existing humanitarian conditions” could be interpreted as the “deliberate infliction on the group of conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” which is one of the definitions of genocide under the Genocide Convention of 1948, to which Israel is party.

And they stated that any directive to implement the plan would be “a manifestly illegal order” that should be refused.

Similarly critical was the Amnesty International rights organization, which said that plans for the “relocation” of Palestinians inside Gaza or deportation outside Gaza against their will “would amount to the war crime of unlawful transfer or deportation. When committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on the civilian population, it would also constitute a crime against humanity.”

Speaking to The Guardian, former PM Olmert described the proposal as “a concentration camp” and argued that it was designed to facilitate a plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza.

“When they build a camp where they [plan to] ‘clean’ more than half of Gaza, then the inevitable understanding of the strategy of this [is that] it is not to save [Palestinians]. It is to deport them, to push them and to throw them away. There is no other understanding that I have, at least,” the former prime minister said.