Israel Defense Minister Unveils Plan For ‘Concentration Camp’ In Gaza

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 revealed 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 antisemitic given the parallels to Nazi Germany — it’s unambiguously applicable under the Merriam-Webster definition 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. 

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; more than 600 are reported dead around the aid stations since late May. Whistleblowing soldiers have told reporters that lethal weapons are being used against unarmed people 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 Chief of Staff’s office said there was no plan to move masses of Gaza residents or to concentrate them somewhere in the territory. However, that assurance is itself seemingly contradicted by the operations order for “Gideon’s Chariots,” the IDF’s latest operation launched in May, which says one objective is “managing and mobilizing the civilian population,” Haaretz 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 pic.twitter.com/EusxcxEHdP

— International Defence Analysis (@Defence_IDA) July 3, 2025

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.” 

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 +972 Magazine 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 Antiwar.com, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich outlined a forcible displacement scheme in candid and grim terms that belie Netanyahu’s characterization of coming emigration as “voluntary.” In May, he boasted to attendees of a West Bank settlement conference that Palestinians will have no choice 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?