PLANS by Israel’s defence minister to force all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp have been condemned by legal experts and academics, who described the scheme as a blueprint for “crimes against humanity”.
Israel Katz said he has ordered Israel’s military to prepare for establishing a camp, which he called a “humanitarian city”, on the ruins of the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, according to Haaretz.
Plans would see Palestinians have to go through “security screening” before entering, and once inside would not be allowed to leave.
Israeli forces would control the perimeter of the camp and plan to initially “move” 600,000 Palestinians into the site, mostly people currently displaced in the al-Mawasi area, Katz reportedly said at a briefing for Israeli journalists.
The defence minister added that the plan is to eventually have the entire population of Gaza housed there, with Israel aiming to implement “the emigration plan, which will happen”, Haaretz quoted Katz saying.
Israeli politicians, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have been emboldened and enthusiastically promoted forced deportation of Palestinians since the US President Donald Trump said at the start of the year that large numbers of Palestinians should leave Gaza to “clean out” the strip.
One of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers, Michael Sfard, has condemned Katz's plans saying that his scheme breaks international law.
“(Katz) laid out an operational plan for a crime against humanity. It is nothing less than that,” Sfard said.
“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.
“When you drive someone out of their homeland that would be a war crime, in the context of a war. If it’s done on a massive scale like he plans, it becomes a crime against humanity,” Sfard added.
Work on the “humanitarian city” could start during a ceasefire, the defence minister said and that Netanyahu is leading efforts to find countries willing to “take in” Palestinians.
Speaking from the White House on Monday, Netanyahu said the US and Israel were working with other countries that would give Palestinians a “better future.”
“If people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave,” Netanyahu said, as he met with Trump on Monday evening.
Israeli politicians have also been advocates of new Israeli settlements in Gaza.
Plans for the construction of camps called “humanitarian transit areas”, to house Palestinians inside and possibly outside Gaza, had previously been presented to the Trump administration and discussed in the White House, Reuters reported on Monday.
The $2 billion plan bore the name of the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), Reuters said.
GHF denied it had submitted a proposal and said slides seen by Reuters, which laid out the plan, “are not a GHF document”.
Last week, more than 130 leading charities and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in Gaza issued a joint call for an end to the “deadly” GHF aid distribution scheme.
Israel had imposed an 11-week aid blockade on Gaza which pushed the region to the brink of famine, before it was partially lifted on May 19. The GHF began operating a week later and now controls the four distribution sites in the strip, down from some 400 under the previous UN-led system.
