Critics expressed alarm on Tuesday after Israel’s defence minister said he plans to move all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp at the southern tip of the war-battered enclave, according to Israeli media.
Some said it would violate international law and amount to crimes against humanity.
Speaking to reporters at a news briefing on Monday, Israel Katz said he had ordered the Israeli military to prepare for the move, which would establish a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah.
Katz said the military plans to initially hold around 600,000 Palestinians in the Rafah area — which has been largely razed by the Israeli military in the ongoing war — before moving the territory’s roughly two million people there, according to The Times of Israel.
Palestinians would not be allowed to leave the zone, Katz said.
He claims the plan aims to weaken the power of the Palestinian militant group Hamas over the population in Gaza.
It’s unclear if Katz’s plan is related to a proposal seen by Reuters on Monday bearing the name of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a controversial U.S.- and Israeli-backed aid group, which described a plan to build large-scale camps called “Humanitarian Transit Areas” inside — and possibly outside — Gaza to house the Palestinian population.
Palestinians flatly reject idea
With plans being floated once again about the potential relocation or forcible transfer of Palestinians, those in Gaza repudiate the plan, saying they refuse to be further displaced.
“It won’t happen,” Nidal Bliha, 43, told CBC News freelance videographer Mohamed El Saife on Tuesday. “We will remain in the Gaza Strip. Even if we die, we won’t leave it.”
“It’s a ludicrous idea, and executing it is ludicrous,” Majed Zaher, 36, told CBC News.
According to a new Amnesty International report, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — a U.S.- and Israel-backed group that took over aid distribution in Gaza over a month ago — uses a militarized aid mechanism that enables Israel to use starvation as a weapon of war and inflict genocide against Palestinians. Budour Hassan of Amnesty International says those on the ground describe acquiring aid as a ‘harrowing’ endeavour.
Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/1.7575953
The United Nations has long warned that the forcible transfer or deportation of an occupied territory’s civilian population is strictly prohibited under international humanitarian law and “tantamount to ethnic cleansing.”
Samar Al-Basyouni, a 39-year-old mother of three from northern Gaza, said she has been displaced 17 times in the 21-month-long war.
“God willing, nothing happens and we don’t get displaced,” Al-Basyouni said, referring to Katz’s comments.
“We’re from the north and God willing we will return to the north, our primary place.”
‘Large-scale’ camps described in $2B plan: Reuters
Reuters reported on Monday that the $2-billion US plan, created sometime after Feb. 11, was submitted to the Trump administration, according to two sources, one of whom said it was recently discussed in the White House.
The document describes the camps as “large-scale” and “voluntary” places where Palestinians could “temporarily reside, deradicalize, re-integrate and prepare to relocate if they wish to do so.”
Jeremy Konyndyk, president of the Refugees International advocacy group and a former senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, reviewed the plan seen by Reuters.
He said “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.”
The U.S. State Department has approved $30 million US in funding for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, calling on other countries to also support the controversial group delivering aid in war-torn Gaza.
Reuters could not independently determine the status of the plan, who created and submitted it or whether it is still under consideration.
In its response to Reuters, GHF denied it had submitted a proposal and said the slides “are not a GHF document.”
GHF said it had studied “a range of theoretical options to safely deliver aid in Gaza,” but that it “is not planning for or implementing Humanitarian Transit Areas.”
The White House and Israeli Embassy in the U.S. did not respond to a request for comment.
Plan would amount to crimes against humanity: critics
Human rights advocates criticized Katz’s plan.
Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard told the Guardian newspaper that Katz “laid out an operational plan for a crime against humanity.”
Sfard said that transferring the population to the southern tip of Gaza would be to prepare to deport them outside of the country.
“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 said.
Amos Goldberg, historian of the Holocaust at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said Katz’s plan amounted to displacing people from all across Gaza into “a concentration camp or a transit camp for Palestinians before they expel them.”
“It is neither humanitarian nor a city,” Goldberg told the Guardian, also questioning what would take place if Palestinians declined to move to the camp or mounted a determined resistance.
Progress on relocating Palestinians out of Gaza: Trump
Separately, U.S. President Donald Trump, who hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Monday, indicated progress on a contentious effort to relocate Palestinians out of Gaza.
Speaking to reporters at the beginning of a dinner between U.S. and Israeli officials, Netanyahu said the United States and Israel were working with other countries who would give Palestinians a “better future,” suggesting residents of Gaza could move to neighbouring nations.
“If people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave,” Netanyahu said.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were complimentary and optimistic ahead of a dinner meeting to discuss reaching a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Trump, who initially deferred to Netanyahu when asked about the relocating of Palestinians, said countries around Israel were helping out. Both leaders are expected to meet again Tuesday evening, Trump said.
Earlier this year, Trump floated relocating Palestinians and taking over the Gaza Strip to turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
The idea was widely criticized by Palestinians, who vowed to remain in Gaza, and the international community, including humanitarian groups such as Human Rights Watch. In March, Arab leaders responded to Trump’s plan by adopting an reconstruction alternative that would cost $53-billion US but avoid resettling Palestinians.
The plan reviewed by Reuters on Monday calls to facilitate Trump’s “vision for Gaza.”
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led fighters attacked southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. About 50 hostages remain in Gaza, with 20 believed to be alive.
Israel’s military assault on the enclave since has killed over 57,500 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, and razed much of the territory to rubble while displacing most Palestinians multiple times.
