Licence to kill & displace
FOR all President Donald Trump’s claims of ensuring a quick ceasefire in Gaza, Israel has continued its genocidal war on the Palestinians, turning the Strip into a killing field and carrying out ethnic cleansing.
Expectations that Trump’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this month would pave the way for a truce have not materialised. There was no breakthrough despite two meetings between them at the White House.
This has left Israel free to escalate its military onslaught on Gaza even as it continues negotiations with Hamas. Talks in Doha are aimed at reaching agreement on a 60-day ceasefire, exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, inflow of humanitarian assistance and the phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. This is supposed to lead to negotiations for a permanent ceasefire, which Netanyahu still opposes.
The Doha talks are bogged down principally on Israel’s demand to retain control of large parts of the Strip as ‘occupation zones’. This is obviously unacceptable to Hamas, which also wants guarantees that any ceasefire would lead to a permanent end to the war.
As disagreements persist over the withdrawal map, the Israeli military offensive continues to claim more Palestinian lives, aid remains sharply limited with Israel using starvation as a weapon and conducting daily bombings of schools serving as shelters, refugee camps, residential areas and hospitals. Over 58,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel’s war began in October 2023.
Among Israel’s most abhorrent acts is its soldiers shooting and killing hapless, starving Palestinians standing in line for food at controversial military-run aid distribution sites. Almost 900 people have been killed while seeking aid so far, many of them children. Israeli soldiers have told an Israeli newspaper that they are ordered to deliberately shoot at unarmed Palestinians waiting at aid hubs. Israeli forces have also attacked and killed children trying to get water at collection points as a water crisis takes hold in addition to the spread of famine.
Israel’s forced displacement plan will create concentration camps and depopulate Gaza.
To cap these crimes, Israel has unfolded a forced displacement plan to set up what will be a concentration camp in southern Gaza. An announcement by its defence ministry said most of Gaza’s population will be forced into a small and destroyed part of the Strip to be controlled and sealed by the Israeli military.
Demolition operations in Rafah that have levelled large areas show preparations are underway to implement this plan. Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, has declared that within 60 days of any ceasefire agreement, 600,000 Palestinians will be ‘relocated’ to Rafah to what he disingenuously called a “humanitarian city”. Eventually, Gaza’s over two million population will be transferred and confined to the ruins of this southern city. The city would be ‘locked’ with Palestinians not allowed to leave the area except if they “voluntarily migrated” from Gaza to other countries. Emigration, Katz asserted, would be encouraged as part of this plan.
The proposed plan has been widely denounced as “an organised act of genocide” and ethnic cleansing aimed at depopulating the Strip. It has outraged Gaza’s citizens and been condemned by the UN, members of the international community, human rights groups and several prominent Israelis including former prime ministers.
All of them see this as a dangerous scheme leading to the establishment of mass concentration camps for internment and expulsion. The Israeli move would clearly be a violation of international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as a crime against humanity. Hamas has firmly opposed the plan and described it as the latest obstacle to the Doha talks.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNWRA), has slammed the move and said this will “create massive concentration camps at the border with Egypt for the Palestinians, displaced over and over across generations”. It would, he said, “deprive Palestinians of any prospects of a better future in their homeland”.
Two former Israeli prime ministers have also assailed the plan. Ehud Olmert said the project amounted to interning Palestinians into a concentration camp, and if Palestinians are deported to the so-called ‘humanitarian city’ it would be part of an “ethnic cleansing” operation. Former prime minister Yair Lapid also criticised the plan, pointing out that if “exiting it is prohibited, then it is a concentration camp”.
Meanwhile, a hard-hitting analysis in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz titled ‘Concentration camp, illegal orders and war crimes: Israel’s madmen have a grim new plan’ assesses the plan and its ramifications and leaves no doubt it would constitute a war crime. It also cites an open letter written to Katz by 16 top Israeli scholars of international law presenting legal arguments to establish that the plan represents a “manifestly illegal order” which soldiers should refuse to obey. The letter also says “Executing this plan … would represent a list of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and under certain conditions … the crime of genocide”.
In their recent meeting and earlier ones too, Trump and Netanyahu have discussed the relocation of Gazans to neighbouring states. Both have publicly stated that they are discussing this with “surrounding countries”.
Their reference to this as ‘voluntary’ does nothing to obscure the forced nature of such an exodus. In fact, the Israeli plan seeks to implement Trump’s vision of emptying Gaza of Palestinians to ostensibly build a ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. Trump has continued to refer to Gaza as a real estate site. After his recent White House meeting, Netanyahu again attributed his plan to relocate Palestinians to what he called Trump’s “brilliant vision”. All this suggests that not only is the US on board with the Israelis on the plan but it may also be the prime mover.
The question then is what is the rest of the world, especially Arab and Muslim countries, going to do to thwart this insidious move. Resort to more words but no action? Surely it is time for them to shake off their passiveness, show some spine and take collective measures to prevent this from happening. Inaction is complicity. The implementation of the US-backed Israeli plan will not just plunge the Middle East into greater turmoil but it would also be a perfidy perpetrated on the Palestinians.
The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK and UN.
Published in Dawn, July 21st, 2025
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