Israel is recycling an old colonial plan in Gaza
Israeli Army Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir's statement that the “Yellow Line” dividing Gaza will be Israel's new border shows that Israel's Gaza policy is a continuation of its history of redrawing its borders through ethnic cleansing and land grabs.
December 14, 2025
MONDOWEISS
Displaced Palestinian families sheltering inside the UNRWA-run Malak School in Bani Suheila, east of Khan Younis, find themselves suddenly located within the newly designated “yellow line” after the Israeli army repositioned the yellow concrete blocks used to demarcate the so-called “temporary withdrawal line” inside Gaza, December 9, 2025. (Photo: Tariq Mohammad/APA Images)
When Israeli army Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said that the “Yellow Line” cutting Gaza in half will be Israel’s new border, he was enshrining a decades-old Israeli policy toward Gaza.
Today, it boils down to a simple logic: divide the Gaza Strip into two areas separated by the Yellow Line — one remains under Israeli control, with residential blocks constructed for Palestinians to move into after security vetting (without being allowed to leave), and the other is placed under international control, where no reconstruction takes place and only minimal aid would be allowed through.
For now, Israel is willing to settle for this endgame in Gaza, and is actively pushing to expand what it might mean for the continued residence of Palestinians in the Strip. Although Zamir’s statement contradicts the officially stated aim of U.S. President Trump’s plan for Gaza — which outlines a full Israeli withdrawal at the end of the second phase of the ceasefire — the fact that such a vision was articulated by Israel’s highest military figure means it is a reflection of the heart of Israel’s security doctrine and its historic posture toward approaching the “Gaza question.”
Your donation will be MATCHED!
A map of the “Yellow Line” created by the Euro-Med Monitor. (Map: Euro-Med Monitor)
This vision was made clear since before the ceasefire, when Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said back in July that Palestinians in Gaza would be “concentrated” in a “humanitarian city” built over the ruins of Rafah, a plan that was universally condemned by rights groups as a thinly-veiled bid to build a “concentration camp.” More recently, a similar vision emerged in November, when reconstruction plans were reported to be underway on the Israeli side of the Yellow Line, where U.S. officials reportedly said a “new Gaza” would be built. The area falling under Israeli control makes up about 53% of Gaza, although Israel has been expanding the Yellow Line deeper into Gazan territory over the last few weeks.
The fear is that this would facilitate the expulsion of Gazans to other countries via so-called “voluntary emigration,” especially given that this was an explicitly articulated Israeli plan before the ceasefire went into effect; Katz had even created a special bureau tasked with facilitating the “transfer” of Palestinians out of Gaza as the war raged on, which was supposedly meant to work in tandem with the southern Rafah concentration camp Israel had planned on building.
The current plans to create a “new Gaza” under Israeli control bear an ominous resemblance to previous ethnic cleansing schemes.
The current plans to create a “new Gaza” under Israeli control bear an ominous resemblance to these previous ethnic cleansing schemes. Jared Kushner and JD Vance alluded to as much when they said that the “Hamas-controlled” area of Gaza would not receive any aid. This means that Palestinians in Gaza would be forced to leave the heart of the Strip and move to the Israeli-controlled eastern edge — after security vetting — where they would be under the surveillance of Israeli forces in a so-called “green zone.” U.S. officials reportedly said that Palestinians who travel to this area would not be allowed to leave it.
But this vision is not the product of the latest war on Gaza. This strip of land, created by the Nakba of 1948 as a concentration of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, has presented itself as perhaps the greatest challenge to Israel’s colonial project over the past 77 years.
When Israeli army Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said that the “Yellow Line” cutting Gaza in half will be Israel’s new border, he was enshrining a decades-old Israeli policy toward Gaza.
Today, it boils down to a simple logic: divide the Gaza Strip into two areas separated by the Yellow Line — one remains under Israeli control, with residential blocks constructed for Palestinians to move into after security vetting (without being allowed to leave), and the other is placed under international control, where no reconstruction takes place and only minimal aid would be allowed through.
For now, Israel is willing to settle for this endgame in Gaza, and is actively pushing to expand what it might mean for the continued residence of Palestinians in the Strip. Although Zamir’s statement contradicts the officially stated aim of U.S. President Trump’s plan for Gaza — which outlines a full Israeli withdrawal at the end of the second phase of the ceasefire — the fact that such a vision was articulated by Israel’s highest military figure means it is a reflection of the heart of Israel’s security doctrine and its historic posture toward approaching the “Gaza question.”
Your donation will be MATCHED!
A map of the “Yellow Line” created by the Euro-Med Monitor. (Map: Euro-Med Monitor)
This vision was made clear since before the ceasefire, when Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said back in July that Palestinians in Gaza would be “concentrated” in a “humanitarian city” built over the ruins of Rafah, a plan that was universally condemned by rights groups as a thinly-veiled bid to build a “concentration camp.” More recently, a similar vision emerged in November, when reconstruction plans were reported to be underway on the Israeli side of the Yellow Line, where U.S. officials reportedly said a “new Gaza” would be built. The area falling under Israeli control makes up about 53% of Gaza, although Israel has been expanding the Yellow Line deeper into Gazan territory over the last few weeks.
The fear is that this would facilitate the expulsion of Gazans to other countries via so-called “voluntary emigration,” especially given that this was an explicitly articulated Israeli plan before the ceasefire went into effect; Katz had even created a special bureau tasked with facilitating the “transfer” of Palestinians out of Gaza as the war raged on, which was supposedly meant to work in tandem with the southern Rafah concentration camp Israel had planned on building.
The current plans to create a “new Gaza” under Israeli control bear an ominous resemblance to previous ethnic cleansing schemes.
The current plans to create a “new Gaza” under Israeli control bear an ominous resemblance to these previous ethnic cleansing schemes. Jared Kushner and JD Vance alluded to as much when they said that the “Hamas-controlled” area of Gaza would not receive any aid. This means that Palestinians in Gaza would be forced to leave the heart of the Strip and move to the Israeli-controlled eastern edge — after security vetting — where they would be under the surveillance of Israeli forces in a so-called “green zone.” U.S. officials reportedly said that Palestinians who travel to this area would not be allowed to leave it.
But this vision is not the product of the latest war on Gaza. This strip of land, created by the Nakba of 1948 as a concentration of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, has presented itself as perhaps the greatest challenge to Israel’s colonial project over the past 77 years.
The plans to ‘thin out’ Gaza’s population
Gaza’s high population density, its dominant refugee composition, and the continuation of chronically miserable living conditions in the Strip have made Gaza a constant site of resistance. This has also made it a target of continuous Israeli plans aimed at decreasing its population and placing it under its military control. Trump’s “peace” plan, recently enshrined at the UN Security Council, only embraces this colonial legacy.
It was in Gaza that Palestinians first declared a short-lived national government in 1948, and it was in Gaza that the first signs of Palestinian resistance to Israel in the wake of the Nakba began, taking off in the early 1950s and leading to repeated Israeli invasions of the Strip.
In 1953, Israel made a plan to relocate tens of thousands of Palestinians into the Egyptian Sinai desert. The plan, which was sponsored by France and the UK, was exposed by Egypt in 1955, sparking a wave of protests in Gaza rejecting the plan. The following year, Israel invaded the Strip as part of a joint French-British-Israeli war against Egypt — known as the Tripartite aggression of 1956 — that came in response to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. Israeli forces killed some 500 Palestinians in Rafah and Khan Younis during the invasion and bombed Gaza City before withdrawing.
Later, in 1971, Israel made another plan to expel thousands of Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai desert, with the purpose of “thinning out” its population, according to declassified British archival documents. The plan was known to both the U.S. and the UK, but it didn’t succeed.
When the genocide in Gaza began two years ago, Israel’s declared plan for the Strip — to ethnically cleanse the population into the Sinai — was pulled directly from this history. It was revealed as early as December 2023 when Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom reported that Prime Minister Netanyahu had directed Minister of Strategic Planning Ron Dermer to explore plans to “thin out” the Gaza population. In addition to pushing Palestinians into the Sinai, the Israeli report said that “the Sea is also open to Gazans,” meaning that Israel could open a “sea crossing” to precipitate Palestinians’ “mass escape to European and African countries.”
This Israeli vision would later receive brief public U.S. backing when Trump announced in February 2025 that the U.S. plan for Gaza will see the displacement of Gaza’s population and the building of a “riviera” in their place. In September, the Trump “Riviera” plan’s details to forcibly resettle Gazans were leaked to the Washington Post, which detailed how Gazans would be offered a $5,000 “relocation package.” Although the current Trump “peace” plan that brought about the ceasefire in October 2025 is phrased differently, its intentionally vague wording has left the door open for Israel to push through plans that it has been drawing for Gaza over decades.
The logic of demographic engineering
Although population transfer has been at the center of Israel’s dilemma with Gaza, today’s Israeli designs over the Strip also contain a demographic component that draws upon a history of Israeli colonial planning.
Land control as a way of “demographic engineering” has been a cornerstone of this policy since Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem in 1967. Israel expanded the de facto municipal limits of Jerusalem three times — first in 1967, officially expanding the limits of the city by 70.4 square kilometers; then in 2005, when Israel’s planning committee for Jerusalem approved the Jerusalem 2000-2020 “Master Plan ,” which increased Jerusalem’s Israeli municipal limits by 40%; and most recently in 2002, when Israel began to build the separation wall around Jerusalem, which isolated entire Palestinian communities from the city while keeping parts of it under Israeli law, including the Shu’fat refugee camp, Kufr Aqab, Samiramis, Anata, and Qalandia. This cut off some 100,000 Palestinians from Jerusalem.
Today, another Jerusalem “master plan” has been adopted, meant to create a “Greater Jerusalem” area that would be annexed by Israel while effectively cutting the West Bank in two. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that it would effectively “bury” a Palestinian state. Known as the E-1 settlement plan, the project is meant to expand the limits of the Maale Adumim settlement east of Jerusalem. Netanyahu recently approved the plan at a ceremonial event in Maale Adumim last September.
Together, these policies would change the demographic composition of Jerusalem by adding roughly the same number of Israelis to its limits as the number of Palestinians to be excluded from it — a continuation of Israel’s policy of demographic engineering through land grabs. The E-1 plan would also see the forcible ethnic cleansing of thousands of Palestinians in Khan al-Ahmar, Jabal al-Baba, and other Palestinian communities residing in the area slated for annexation, even further thinning out the Palestinian population falling under Israel’s expanding territorial-administrative borders.
The division of Gaza along the Yellow Line carries echoes of this same approach to demographic engineering, coupled with the redrawing of territorial boundaries. The area east of the line is where the smallest number of Palestinians are present — a flattened wasteland that remains virtually empty and would only absorb a limited number of Palestinians once the “green zone” is built there. Eyal Zamir’s statement that it would be included within Israel’s new borders confirms that the current plans for Gaza are an extension of Israel’s demographic logic, which would see Palestinians concentrated in highly controlled blocks that are continuously surveilled and controlled by the Israeli army. The Palestinians corralled in these parts of Gaza will remain at the mercy of the Israeli military, with no guarantees that they would not be eventually expelled from Gaza entirely.
Trump’s 20-point plan was light on details and lacked a clear roadmap for implementation, while the core issues that had been the subject of negotiations over the preceding two years remained unaddressed. Yet for Arab and Islamic mediators, as well as for Palestinians, it guaranteed the end of the genocidal war, even though daily killings have not ceased.
The problem is that the intentionally vague wording of the entire plan left enough room for Israel to implement the same strategy that it has formulated for resolving the “Gaza dilemma” on and off for decades. What is unfolding now in the Gaza Strip combines old doctrines of redrawing borders, population transfer, demographic engineering, and land grab.
No comments:
Post a Comment