In the absence of diplomatic progress, a growing number of Israeli officials, including Netanyahu’s Cabinet ministers and various lawmakers, are pressing ahead with a more definitive - and controversial - vision of a Gaza endgame.
Last Tuesday NZT, Defence Minister Israel Katz said he had instructed the country’s military to prepare for the construction of a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, the southernmost town in the Gaza Strip that has been largely razed amid Israel’s ongoing campaign.
The plan, as reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, would see Israeli forces vet and relocate hundreds of thousands of people from Gaza’s north to this facility, which they would not be able to leave as Israel continued its operations against remaining Hamas redoubts.
Katz indicated that Israel’s ultimate goal would be to compel much of this population to emigrate to other countries willing to receive them.
As recently as last week, Israel’s military has denied that population expulsions were part of its operational objectives in Gaza.
But Katz’s proposal reflects a long-sought goal among many Israelis, especially on the right, to wholly take over Gaza and remove some or all of its remaining two million Palestinians.
Now, this vision has teeth: “This is not an expression of opinion or desire”, Michael Sfard, a leading Israeli human rights lawyer, told the Guardian.
“Katz ordered the Army to prepare. It has more meaning, because this guy holds the administrative power to actually do it.”
In March, in the wake of the collapse of an earlier ceasefire, Katz had issued a warning to Gaza residents that, if they didn’t release the remaining hostages and “remove Hamas” themselves, Israel would act with “unprecedented force”.
Other “options” were possible for Gaza’s population, Katz suggested, including “relocation to other countries”, while threatening “complete destruction and devastation”.
At the time, Meron Rapoport, a left-wing Israeli journalist, parsed the statements coming from prominent lawmakers and officials, as well as connected right-wing Israeli journalists, and came up with this somewhat prescient conclusion: “Israel is preparing to forcibly displace the entire population of Gaza - through a combination of evacuation orders and intense bombardment - into an enclosed and possibly fenced-off area,” he wrote on April 1.
He suggested the goal was tantamount to the creation of a large “concentration camp”.
Given the experience of the Jewish people, that’s incendiary language to invoke.
But critics of Israel’s current approach have latched on to it.
“This would de-facto create massive concentration camps at the border with Egypt for the Palestinians, displaced over and over across generations,” Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN’s chief agency for Palestinians, posted on social media in reaction to Katz’s plans.
“This would also deprive Palestinians of any prospects for a better future in their homeland.”
Katz’s “humanitarian city” would “incarcerate all the enclave’s residents”, noted a Haaretz editorial on Friday, and “is a moral and historic nadir for the State of Israel and the Jewish people”.
“No matter how they try in Israel to wrap this move with laundered epithets, they are talking about a concentration camp.”
Another more anodyne euphemism was conjured by the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to a recent Reuters report.
The organisation has a plan to create large-scale “Humanitarian Transit Areas” to house the Palestinian population and enable the full dismantling of Hamas dominance in the territory.
Explicit in the term is the possibility that Palestinians in Gaza will be encouraged to emigrate in circumstances where their return home is not guaranteed.
The GHF denies these plans are in motion.
The entity has been at the centre of controversies surrounding the delivery of aid, which have seen numerous incidents of violence at distribution points and the looting of aid by local gangs.
“The location and nature of the GHF distribution centres, the displacement and the announcement of a so-called ‘humanitarian city’ as a staging post for removal from Gaza, speaks to Israel’s longer-term intentions of removing Palestinians,” Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator and president of the US Middle East Peace Project, wrote in an email.
“Israel has been backing armed clans and will continue to prefer deadly chaos over order.”
Israeli legal scholars Eyal Benvenisti and Chaim Gans were bleak in their analysis: “We believe this plan to be morally and legally unconscionable”, they wrote in reference to the plan floated by Katz.
“We believe it to be especially shameful given the only possible justification for Zionism: providing a shelter for people persecuted for their nationhood after being uprooted, concentrated and deported from their countries.”
