Israel’s defence minister says he has instructed its military to prepare a plan to move all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp in the south of the territory, Israeli media reports say.
Israel Katz told journalists on Monday he wanted to establish a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of the city of Rafah to initially house about 600,000 Palestinians – and eventually the whole 2.1 million population.
He said the goal was to bring people inside after security screening to ensure they were not Hamas operatives, and that they would not be allowed to leave.
If conditions allowed, he added, construction would begin during a 60-day ceasefire that Israel and Hamas are trying to negotiate.
One Israeli human rights lawyer condemned it as nothing less than an “operational plan for a crime against humanity”.
“It is all about population transfer to the southern tip of the Gaza Strip in preparation for deportation outside the strip,” Michael Sfard told the Guardian newspaper.
The UN has also previously warned that the deportation or forcible transfer of an occupied territory’s civilian population is strictly prohibited under international humanitarian law and “tantamount to ethnic cleansing”.
There was no immediate comment from the Palestinian Authority or Hamas.
Later on Monday, during a meeting at the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about US President Donald Trump’s proposal that the US take over post-war Gaza and permanently resettle its population elsewhere.
Netanyahu said: “I think President Trump has a brilliant vision. It’s called free choice. If people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave…
“We’re working with the United States very closely about finding countries that will seek to realise what they always say – that they wanted to give the Palestinians a better future.”
Trump said: “We’ve had great co-operation from… surrounding countries, great cooperation from every single one of them. So, something good will happen.”
In March, Arab states backed a $53bn (£39bn) Egyptian alternative to Trump’s plan for Gaza’s reconstruction that would allow the Palestinians living there to stay in place.
They also stressed their “categorical rejection of any form of displacement of the Palestinian people”, describing such an idea as “a gross violation of international law, a crime against humanity and ethnic cleansing”.
The Palestinian Authority and Hamas also endorsed the Egyptian plan, but the US and Israel said it failed to address realities in Gaza.
Palestinians fear a repeat of the Nakba – the Arabic word for “catastrophe” – when hundreds of thousands fled or were driven from their homes before and during the war that followed the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Many of those refugees ended up in Gaza, where they and their descendants make up three-quarters of the population. Another 900,000 registered refugees live in the occupied West Bank, while 3.4 million others live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, according to the UN.
The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.
More than 57,500 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
Most of Gaza’s population has also been displaced multiple times. More than 90% of homes are estimated to be damaged or destroyed; the healthcare, water, sanitation and hygiene systems have collapsed; and there are shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter.
