With Gaza ceasefire negotiations under way and President Trump raising hopes of a deal being reached by week's end, Defense Minister Israel Katz on Monday https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-07/ty-article/.premium/defense-minister-israel-to-concentrate-all-gaza-population-in-rafah-humanitarian-zone/00000197-e56a-d1ad-ab97-e5ef764e0000

that the IDF will create what it calls a "humanitarian city" in the wasteland that is Rafah, and then forcibly concentrate Gaza's entire population of nearly 2 million people inside it.

Though the Israeli government and its advocates will likely to condemn already-widespread usage of the term "concentration camp" to describe this undertaking -- likely claiming it's somehow https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/antisemitism-defined-why-drawing-comparisons-of-contemporary-israeli-policy-to-the-nazis-is-antisemitic

of the term:

concentration camp (noun) a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard

In the first phase, the IDF plans to round up 600,000 displaced Palestinians who are living in the coastal Mawasi area and move them to Rafah, a city in southernmost Gaza that borders Egypt and Israel. Eventually, every Gaza resident will be moved. After security screening, Palestinians will be ushered inside the camp, with IDF guards ensuring that none are able to leave, Katz said.

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While the Israeli military will secure the perimeter, the Netanyahu government is looking for some type of international organization(s) to take charge of the interior, to include overseeing the distribution of aid, an enterprise currently managed by the shadowy Gaza Humanitarian Foundation with the IDF dishing out mass killings of Palestinians approaching the aid points; https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/613-killed-gaza-aid-distribution-sites-near-humanitarian-covoys-says-un-2025-07-04/

as brute-force crowd control.

Katz's announcement contradicts what the IDF Chief of Staff's office told Israel's High Court on the very same day. In response to a petition filed by IDF reserve soldiers asking the court to determine if Israel was violating international law by forcibly displacing Palestinians with perhaps the ultimate goal of expelling them, the https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-07/ty-article/.premium/israeli-army-chief-denies-forced-displacement-of-gazans-in-response-to-soldiers-petitions/00000197-e4f2-d5bc-a597-eff3126c0000

reports.

On Monday, Katz also reiterated Israel's intention to subsequently facilitate Palestinians' departures to other countries, telling reporters that Israel will implement "the emigration plan, which will happen." Separately, however, an official told Haaretz that Israel's overtures to various countries have all been refused. While Israel's champions commonly claim such refusals prove that Palestinians are dangerously undesirable people, Middle East governments are intensely wary of being perceived by their own populations as facilitating ethnic cleansing by Israel, for fear of domestic backlash up to and including insurrections.

RAFAH, GAZA BEFORE & AFTER.

-TRT World https://t.co/EusxcxEHdP

— International Defence Analysis (@Defence_IDA) https://twitter.com/Defence_IDA/status/1940677148983153047?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

For somewhat similar reasons, Israel is likely to struggle to find what Katz called "international partners" to run the interior of the Rafah concentration camp. Human-rights-oriented groups and foreign governments will recoil at an invitation to serve as a key component of a scheme that most objective observers would characterize as a war crime. Given that, we could see the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation fill the void, which would only compound the controversy.

Meeting with President Trump at the White House on Monday evening, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck an optimistic tone about the prospect of mass Palestinian emigration, and characterized the idea as voluntary in nature:

"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 realize what they always say, that they wanted to give the Palestinians a better future. I think we're getting close to finding several countries."

Trump echoed Netanyahu's optimism, saying, "We've had great cooperation from ... surrounding countries, great cooperation from every single one of them. So something good will happen."

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Though the implementation phase is apparently now imminent, the idea of corralling all of Gaza's population into Rafah and then moving them out has been circulating since the very beginning of Israel's response to the Hamas invasion of Oct 7 2023. A Ministry of Intelligence policy paper dated Oct 10 2023 and obtained by https://www.972mag.com/intelligence-ministry-gaza-population-transfer/

that same month recommended herding Gaza's entire 2.2 million residents south and then forcing them into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.

More recently, as Dave DeCamp notes at https://news.antiwar.com/2025/07/07/israeli-defense-minister-orders-plan-to-build-concentration-camp-for-gazas-civilian-population/

but to abandon a land rendered uninhabitable by the IDF:

“Within a few months...Gaza will be totally destroyed. The Gazan citizens will be concentrated in the south. They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

Where, exactly, will those "other places" be?

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Tue, 07/08/2025 - 23:50

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/israel-defense-minister-unveils-plan-concentration-camp-gaza