The plan has been likened to building a concentration camp in Gaza.
By Sharon Zhang , Truthout
Published July 8, 2025
Israel’s Defense Minister said on Monday that he has instructed the military to prepare plans to force all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp where they will be imprisoned by Israeli soldiers.
Minister Israel Katz told reporters that the Israeli government was planning to establish a so-called “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza, on what used to be Rafah until Israel decimated the city. Israel would first force 600,000 Palestinians into the area, and eventually the entire population of over 2 million.
Israel would screen people for entry into the camp, Katz said. If the plans allowed, the camp would be established during a temporary, 60-day ceasefire currently being discussed by the U.S. and other officials.
Haaretz reports that the perimeter of the camp would be guarded by the Israeli military, and that Katz says that he is “seeking international partners to manage the zone.”
It’s unclear whether this plan, announced by Katz amid a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, has support from other Israeli ministers. Netanyahu and the U.S. have been collaborating on a plan for the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza, but Haaretz reports that Israeli officials don’t believe that the plan will go forward, and that other countries have not agreed to receive expelled Palestinians.
According to Reuters, the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has prepared a plan to create “Humanitarian Transit Areas” that would effectively constitute large camps to concentrate Palestinians into, supposedly with the goal of “replacing Hamas’ control over the population in Gaza,” the proposal for the plan reads.
The plan would be carried out with the goal of advancing U.S. President Donald Trump’s “vision for Gaza,” planning documents say, referring to Trump’s “riviera” plan for the ethnic cleansing of the Strip.
Rights groups and experts have likened GHF’s plan and Katz’s announcement to a “modern-day concentration camp.”
“Between this sociopathic proposal and the daily massacres of Palestinians seeking aid, it is now beyond clear that the GHF is nothing more than a U.S.-backed arm of the Israeli government’s efforts to ethnically cleanse and kill as many Palestinians as possible,” said the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Human rights experts have said Katz’s “humanitarian city” plan would be a blatant war crime.
“[Katz] laid out an operational plan for a crime against humanity. It is nothing less than that,” Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard told The Guardian. “It is all about population transfer to the southern tip of the Gaza Strip in preparation for deportation outside the Strip.”
“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 went on.
Palestinians have already been crammed into smaller and smaller areas of the Strip, with 85 percent of Gaza under evacuation orders or turned into a fully militarized zone by Israel, according to the UN. Overcrowding, starvation and a lack of water and other basic needs have made these areas effectively uninhabitable.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has said that Palestinians are squeezed into such a small area that there is less space per person in Palestine than is afforded to prisoners in Guantánamo Bay — a prison that is notorious for torture and abuses.
“Confining the population between bombing, hunger, and disease on one hand, and preventing them from returning to or even remaining near their destroyed homes on the other, makes it clear that the measures imposed in the Gaza Strip are not a temporary emergency displacement, but part of a permanent and premeditated policy of forced displacement,” the human rights group wrote in a report on Tuesday.
“This policy aims to bring about a comprehensive demographic transformation in the enclave by depopulating it, placing it under full military control, and encircling it with an unprecedented blockade,” Euro-Med Monitor went on.
