Stop Israel’s Dystopian “Humanitarian City” Plan—Before It’s Too Late
The ruins of the city of Rafah. Photo: Getty Images
The Israeli government has just put forward one of the most brazenly genocidal schemes in modern memory—and unless we act immediately, the world will once again let it happen.
As reported in Haaretz, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz is proposing to force some 600,000 Palestinians—and eventually the entire population of Gaza—into a fenced-in “humanitarian city” to be built on the ruins of Rafah in southern Gaza. The plan is to “screen” the population, separate out alleged Hamas members, and then pressure the remaining civilians—men, women, and children—to “voluntarily” leave Gaza for another country. Which country? That hasn’t even been determined. The point isn’t relocation—it’s erasure. This reflects a long-standing goal among many Israelis, especially on the right, to take full control of Gaza and clear it of Palestinians.
The UN has warned that the deportation or forcible transfer of an occupied territory’s civilian population is strictly prohibited under international humanitarian law and “tantamount to ethnic cleansing”.
While all eyes are focused on a possible ceasefire, Gallant is not interested in peace—he’s interested in a “final solution.” A speeding up of the second Nakba we have been witnessing for the past 20 months. In fact, he has stated that construction would begin during a 60-day ceasefire. So what’s the point of a ceasefire, if it’s used to build a concentration camp?
Once Palestinians are herded into this camp, they will not be allowed to leave for other parts of Gaza. They won’t be allowed to return to what’s left of their homes, their neighborhoods, their farms, their schools. They will be trapped inside this militarized zone, under constant surveillance, held at gunpoint until Israel can arrange their deportation.
Just think of the tragic, unbearable irony: the Israeli government—founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust—is now building a massive concentration camp for an entire population.
If that sounds unthinkable, look at what Israel has already gotten away with.
For the past 20 months, the world has watched—and largely enabled—a genocidal campaign in Gaza. Over 55,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered, the majority of them women and children. Israel has bombed hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and mosques. It has flattened entire neighborhoods with AI-generated kill lists. It has assassinated journalists, targeted ambulances, destroyed bakeries and water systems.
It has used hunger as a weapon of war, deliberately blocking aid trucks, attacking convoys, and starving the population into desperation. And in a cruel twist, it has created the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—a scheme to funnel aid through Israeli-controlled routes and sideline the UN and experienced NGOs. Its so-called “distribution points” are really death traps, where desperate people have been shot day after day as they risk their lives to get a bit of food.
This engineered starvation is not an accident. It is a strategy—a form of collective punishment on a scale rarely seen in modern times.
We have already failed the people of Gaza—again and again. We failed when we looked the other way as children were buried in rubble. We failed when we allowed our tax dollars to fund the very bombs that wiped out refugee camps. We failed when we kept pretending there was still a line Israel wouldn’t cross.
Now Katz is telling us—explicitly—what comes next: mass internment and forced expulsion. And unless we rise up with every ounce of outrage we have, we will fail again.
Let’s be absolutely clear: the infrastructure for this plan is already being built. Netanyahu and Trump are lobbying corrupt governments in the Global South to accept the deported. This is not a negotiating tactic to strengthen Israel’s position in ceasefire talks—it is the next phase of a genocide we’ve been watching in real time for nearly two years.
And what is the U.S. government doing? Still issuing meaningless statements about “Israel’s right to defend itself.” Still shipping weapons. Still blocking accountability at the United Nations—and even sanctioning officials like UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for daring to speak out.
President Trump could stop this today—by cutting off military aid, backing the International Criminal Court’s investigations, and declaring that forced displacement of Palestinians will not be tolerated. But instead, he’s still dreaming of turning Gaza into a Middle Eastern resort for the ultra-rich.
Meanwhile, more Arab governments stand ready to normalize ties with Israel, making deals with war criminals while their fellow Arabs are starved, bombed, and now threatened with mass exile. Where is the outcry from Cairo, Riyadh, Amman? Is there absolutely no red line?
One bright spot on the international scene is the Hague group, which will convene an emergency meeting in Colombia on July 15–16. This growing bloc of nations has joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. These countries are taking a courageous stand to uphold international law and defend Palestinian life. Every nation that claims to value justice must join them—immediately.
And here in the United States, every member of Congress must be pushed—loudly, relentlessly—to take a public stand. No more vague language. No more hiding behind mealy-mouthed scripts. We demand immediate, public opposition to this “humanitarian city” plan—and a full cutoff of military support to Israel. This is a moment of moral reckoning. Choose a side.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking this can’t happen. It is happening. The groundwork is being laid. The walls are going up. The deportation flights are being negotiated.
There is no neutral ground. This is not a policy debate. This is genocide—on camera, with diplomatic cover, and with our tax dollars.
The time to stop Israel’s dystopian plan is not tomorrow. It is now.
Rise up. Speak out. Flood the streets. Bombard Congress. Demand accountability.
Stop the plan. Save Gaza. Before it’s too late.
Israel’s Demographic Project in Gaza: An Assault on the Palestinian Future
Twenty years ago, Israel unilaterally disengaged from Gaza after the post-1967 years of occupation and settlement. An overriding factor governing the decision to withdraw was the issue of demography. With a population of over two million Palestinians, Gaza has always represented a significant part of a broad demographic problem facing the self-declared ‘only democracy in the Middle East.’ Within Israel and the occupied territories (the area that has been under direct or indirect Israeli control for 58 years) there are over 14 million people. Approximately half are Israeli Jews, the other half, Palestinians. This underreported reality stands sharply at odds with the notion of a Jewish and democratic state, especially one which aspires to the land borders of a Greater Israel.
Twenty-one months after Israel re-entered, Gaza stands in ruins — obliterated, to use the current Trumpian term. The State of Israel has unleashed terror upon the Strip on an unprecedented scale. The different elements of the collective punishment of Gaza have become familiar but still make for shocking reading: the indiscriminate bombing; the sniper and drone attacks; the withholding of aid; the domicide; the ongoing forced displacement; the restriction of access to water, food, healthcare; the targeting of civilians and razing of infrastructure.
That these things add up to genocide is hardly a matter for debate anymore. Instead, we need to ask where all this is headed. We can’t simply accept the hasbara narrative that Israel only wants the return of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas. The current state of the Strip cannot support this. There is no access to Gaza, but we can look at satellite photographs. We can look at the footage provided by Palestinians. We can also listen to Israelis in public, political and media spaces. More is going on here. This is a war that is going way beyond the oft-repeated objectives.
It seems perverse on the part of many Western commentators not to link the devastation of Gaza to current public discourse in Israel and to Zionist concerns about demography and Palestinian fertility. There are two aspects of this genocidal tragedy that suggest a renewed drive on Israel’s part to tackle a perceived ‘demographic timebomb.’ Firstly, Israel is manifestly engaged with the idea of the ethnic cleansing of the population and secondly, it is waging a war on the Palestinian future through the daily targeting of women and children.
The forced transfer of the Gazan population is now openly discussed, an entirely possible endgame legitimized by Trump’s plan. A new infrastructure of resettlement (with a nomenclature betraying a nostalgia for Gush Katif) is being prepared by the IDF’s D9 Caterpillar bulldozers. Palestinians have been uprooted and are continually being displaced within the Strip. The GHF aid ‘system’ is exacerbating this. Their homes have been destroyed and the areas that Palestinians can move in are now extremely limited, the conditions intolerable. It is in this context that we are presented with the current idea of a ‘humanitarian city.’ As Trump himself has put it, Gaza is a ‘hellhole.’ It might seem to some that the world will not stand by and let the ethnic cleansing of Gaza happen but, of course, it’s already happening. The uncomfortable optics of forced transfer won’t be an issue when conditions have become so bad that people beg to leave and their ejection from their own land can be spun as an act of mercy.
Bad enough, you may think. But what should be equally as outrageous to the outside world is Israel’s sustained assault on Palestinian children and women. At the point of writing, a figure of over 57,000 fatalities in Gaza includes 17,000 children and 9,000 women.
South Africa’s ongoing case at the ICJ includes the accusation that Israel, in contravention of the Genocide Convention, is imposing measures intended to prevent births within the Gazan population. A recent U.N. report by the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory criticizes Israel for deliberately targeting health facilities in Gaza, destroying ‘in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group.’ The WHO has warned of a health system at breaking point. Cesarean sections are being performed without anesthetic in those few hospitals still operating and newborn children are dying due to a scarcity of incubators and medical staff. The weaponization of aid means that, according to UNICEF, 17,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women currently require treatment for acute malnutrition in Gaza. Doctors have described a critical shortage of baby formula as being a direct result of Israeli aid restrictions.
This onslaught on children and mothers is a key component of this genocide which can be linked to a long-held Zionist obsession with Palestinian birthrates. Mandate Palestine was not, of course, a land without a people, as pioneers of the state such as Israel’s first Prime Minister, Ben Gurion, knew. The country has always worried about the need to manufacture and maintain a Jewish majority. A chief architect of the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Arnon ‘the Arab Counter’ Soffer, long warned of the danger for the Jewish state of the Palestinian womb, Arafat’s ‘biological weapon.’
Evidence of the intent to target women and children can be seen in statements by Israeli public figures, collated in South Africa’s petition to the ICJ and freely available elsewhere. These senior figures include not just the usual suspects like Ben Gvir and Smotrich but also the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog who responded to Oct 7 with the declaration that there are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza, ‘an entire nation’ is responsible.’ This normalization of genocidal discourse, particularly in relation to women and children, is enabled by a national political consensus and an indifferent Israeli public. It seems that there is not one righteous man in Gaza, or indeed, woman or child. ‘The children… have brought this upon themselves’, as one opposition member of the Knesset put it.
Barring international intervention, it seems certain that at the end of this latest phase in Gaza there will be fewer Palestinians. The demographic facts will have changed; they have already changed. The numbers are appalling enough, with 57,000 fatalities likely being an underestimate. But there are also names. For those who care to seek them out.
Indiscriminate blanket bombing has killed thousands of civilians and rendered Gaza unlivable. This is a war of homicidal excess, not one that is being waged to recover hostages and eliminate a terrorist organization. It is difficult not to conclude that it is part of a longer-term project to change the ethnic balance between the river and the sea.
Such are the ongoing demands of Zionism and its insatiable hunger for land, that it is not enough to erase the Palestinian past and present. Ethnic cleansing can only be part of a wider strategy. The demographic threat of tomorrow must also be addressed.
The facts are available, as is the evidence of intention. If the hostage situation is resolved, if Hamas is somehow ‘defeated’, who seriously believes that the expansionist, frontier state of Israel will leave Gaza alone? Or the West Bank? If Zionism is to avoid a death spiral, the demographic timebomb must be defused. The project demands land, and it demands a Jewish majority on that land.
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