Israel Katz is calling it a “humanitarian city”, from which Palestinians will be encouraged to “voluntarily emigrate” out of Gaza.
But analysts believe the Israeli defence minister, who unveiled plans this week to confine over two million Palestinians into a small area in southern Gaza, is using distorted language.
Experts in genocide and international law say the “humanitarian city” is more akin to a concentration camp. And any talk of “voluntary emigration”, they told Middle East Eye, should actually be read as forcible displacement.
The proposals are not fringe discussions. They were revealed by Katz, and appear to have the backing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Here, we break down what we know about the plan, how it relates to months-long US and Israeli rhetoric of ejecting Palestinians from Gaza, and what the international legal implications are.
What do we know about the ‘humanitarian city’ plan?
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on
Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
Katz said the plan would initially involve the ejection of 600,000 displaced Palestinians currently living in camps and makeshift homes in the al-Mawasi area of southern Gaza to an area in the ruins of Rafah city.
Once they arrive in this new zone, security screenings would take place. They won’t be allowed to leave once they’ve entered, Katz said.
Eventually, the entire civilian population of over two million in Gaza would be confined to this small “city”.
Four aid distribution centres are to be established within the area.
The defence minister initially said that Israeli forces would secure the perimeter of the site, but would not run it. He said Israel was seeking international partners to manage the city.
However, an Israeli official told Haaretz that Israel may run the area “for the time being”.
The official said that Netanyahu thinks that if Israel doesn’t manage the zone in the short term, “no one will volunteer on their own accord to take control over the humanitarian matter, and Hamas will simply continue to rule”.
Netanyahu ‘backs Gaza concentration camp’ plan, reportedly says ‘feed them Ben & Jerry’s’
Read More »
The source added that the prime minister believed that countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE would then be incentivised to take over Israeli control of the area, “without being considered collaborators with Israel”.
There is no evidence that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or any other country in the region has expressed a desire to be involved in the plans.
Katz said that once concentrated in the new city, Palestinians would be encouraged to “voluntarily” leave the Gaza Strip for other countries, as part of an “emigration plan” he said “will happen”.
He added that Netanyahu was leading efforts to find countries to take in Palestinians from Gaza.
There is not yet a clear indication as to when construction for such a new city would begin, or if it could go ahead without international backing.
Katz envisaged that if conditions permitted, the city would be built during a two-month pause in hostilities. Such a ceasefire is being negotiated between Israel and Hamas, via intermediaries, but is far from being agreed.
What does international law say?
The planned city will violate multiple provisions of international humanitarian law (IHL), according to Eitan Diamond, a Jerusalem-based senior legal expert at the Diakonia International Humanitarian Law Centre.
He said that in accordance with the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, populations in occupied territories “shall at all times be humanely treated”, and may only exceptionally be placed under assigned residence or internment when there are “imperative reasons of security”.
“A blanket decision to enclose hundreds of thousands of people in a concentration camp or zone clearly falls well outside the lawful exception and would entail an unlawful deprivation of liberty in breach of IHL and of human rights law,” Diamond told Middle East Eye.
The Fourth Geneva Convention also states that mass transfers of people from an occupied territory are prohibited.
‘Third countries that willingly take part in the crime would be complicit in the violation of the law’
– Neve Gordon, Israeli expert on international law
“Compelling residents of the occupied territory to move from their homes to another part of the occupied territory would constitute a prohibited act of forcible transfer,” said Diamond.
In relation to Katz’s “emigration plan”, Diamond added that compelling the population to leave the occupied territory altogether to move to another country “would constitute an act of deportation”.
“Both are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, implicating those responsible in the commission of a war crime.”
He added that when such acts are committed as part of a systematic attack against a civilian population, which appears to be the case in Gaza, it implicates those responsible in the crime against humanity of deportation or forcible transfer.
IHL permits warring parties to temporarily transfer civilian populations for humanitarian reasons, however they must be allowed to return to their homes.
“These are often called ‘safe zones’, ‘safe areas’, ‘buffer zones’, and ‘safe humanitarian zones’,” Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London, told MEE.
“What Katz is proposing is a ‘humanitarian concentration camp’, which is a very different story.”
Diamond said that a warring party cannot move a population to avoid risks being caused by that same warring party. As such, he said, Israel’s plan to displace hundreds of thousands of people into a very tight area could not be characterised as a lawful evacuation.
“On the contrary, such actions would almost certainly amount to an act of ethnic cleansing.”
Is the emigration plan really ‘voluntary’?
The short answer is no.
Katz’s “emigration plan” is a manifestation of US President Donald Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse the enclave.
Trump said in February that Washington would “take over” the Gaza Strip and eject the Palestinian population to other countries. In the meantime, the enclave would be turned into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Katz has been a cheerleader for these plans for months. In March, he announced a new government agency set up to oversee “voluntary departures” in compliance with Trump’s proposal.
‘Concentrating the civilian population in the way Israel proposes is clearly an act of genocide’
– Martin Shaw, sociologist
“The phrase ‘voluntary emigration’ has long been used in Zionist ideology as a euphemism for expelling the Palestinian people from their homeland, including by creating coercive conditions that compel the natives to leave,” Nimer Sultany, a Palestinian academic in public law at Soas University in London, told MEE.
Sultany noted that Katz had long threatened Palestinians with another Nakba, having made such remarks in 2022 before the ongoing war.
The Nakba, or “catastrophe”, refers to the forced displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes in 1948.
“There is nothing voluntary about any emigration scheme that Israel devises in these circumstances,” Martin Shaw, a prominent sociologist and author of several books on the subject of genocide, told MEE.
“The people of Gaza have been bombed out of their homes, lost their loved ones, starved and shot at when they try to get food.
“Israel will be using all this cruelty to force people to leave, and to remove their right to return as they have from previous generations of Palestinians.”
Tony Blair Institute linked to Gaza plan condemned as ethnic cleansing: Report
Read More »
Diamond said that it is well established under IHL that forcible displacements can be brought about by a coercive environment.
“When a party creates conditions that compel people to move to avert conditions that threaten their lives or wellbeing, their decision to move is not a genuine choice,” he said.
“This is no more voluntary than the decision of a person who hands over their wallet to a gun robber saying ‘your money or your life.’”
So far, Israel has failed to find any countries willing to take displaced Palestinians from Gaza.
“Given that Israel’s actions and future plans are blatantly illegal and constitute war crimes, third countries that willingly take part in the crime would be complicit in the violation of the law,” said Gordon.
The UN said on Wednesday that it stood firmly against any such plans to forcibly displace those in Gaza.
How is the ‘city’ being described by experts?
Many legal experts, including one of Britain’s most distinguished human rights lawyers, have said the plans are synonymous with concentration camps.
Sultany noted that the plans involve a starving population being “concentrated” into a tiny site and being prevented from leaving.
Baroness Helena Kennedy labels Israel’s Gaza campaign a genocide
Read More »
“In other words, the civilian population has no choice, and they will be placed in a prison or a ghetto that Israel controls,” he stated. “This is the definition of a concentration camp.”
He said that Israel had already concentrated Palestinians in less than 20 percent of Gaza, and imposed conditions on them “that bring about their physical destruction”.
“The evidence that Israel has been committing a genocide is overwhelming,” Sultany said.
Shaw, author of War and Genocide, What is Genocide and Genocide and International Relations, agreed.
“Concentrating the civilian population in the way Israel proposes is clearly an act of genocide,” he said.
He added that Katz’s proposal was designed to “consolidate the results” of Israeli killings over the past 21 months by heading towards “removing the survivors so as to complete the destruction of Palestinian society in Gaza”.
“The destruction of a society is, of course, the very meaning of genocide.”
