Image source, Getty Images
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- Author, Ione Wells & David Gritten
- Author's title, BBC News, Jerusalén
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Israeli defense minister Israel Katz said he instructed his military to prepare a plan to transfer all the Palestinians of Gaza to a camp in the south of the territory, according to Israeli media.
Katz declared to the local press on Monday that he wanted to establish a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of the city of Rafah to initially house some 600,000 Palestinians, and eventually the entire population of 2.1 million people from the Gaza Strip.
The minister added that the objective of the plan was to transfer people to the interior of that area after a security control to ensure that they were not agents of Hamas. He also said that once people are there they will not be allowed to leave.
The construction would begin for a high fire that Israel and Hamas are trying to negotiate, if the conditions allow it, he added.
An Israeli lawyer for human rights, Michael Sfar, condemned the announcement.
“(Katz) presented an operational plan for a crime against humanity. It's nothing less than that,” Sfard told the British newspaper The Guardian.
“It's about transferring the population to the southern end of Gaza in preparation for deportation outside the strip,” he added.
Image source, Getty Images
“Ethnic Cleaning”
The United Nations has also previously warned that deportation or forced transfer of the civilian population of an occupied territory is strictly prohibited by international humanitarian law and “equals ethnic cleaning.”
There were no immediate comments from the Palestinian or Hamas authority.
Later on Monday, during a meeting at the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talked about the proposal of US President Donald Trump, that the United States takes care of Gaza and permanently reassences its population elsewhere.
Netanyahu declared: “I think President Trump has a brilliant vision. It's called free choice. If people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should leave …”.
“We are working closely with the United States to find countries that seek to realize what they always say: they wanted to give the Palestinians a better future.”
Trump declared: “We have had a great cooperation of … neighboring countries, a great cooperation of each and every one of them. So something good will happen.”
Image source, Getty Images
In March, Arab States in the region supported an Egyptian initiative of US $ 53,000 that is an alternative to Trump's plan for Gaza's reconstruction and that would allow the Palestinians who live there to remain in their homes.
The Arab countries also emphasized their “categorical rejection of any form of displacement of the Palestinian people”, stating that this would constitute “a serious violation of international law, a crime against humanity and ethnic cleaning.”
The Palestinian authority and Hamas also supported the Egyptian Plan, but the United States and Israel affirmed that it did not approach Gaza's reality.
The Palestinians fear that Nakba (the Arabic word that means “catastrophe”) is repeated, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes before and during the war that followed the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Many of those refugees ended up in Gaza, where they and their descendants constitute three quarters of the population. Another 900,000 registered refugees live in the occupied West Bank, while another 3.4 million live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, according to the UN.
Image source, Getty Images
The Israeli army launched a campaign to destroy Hamas after an unprecedented cross -border attack on October 7, 2023, in which some 1,200 people died and 251 were taken as hostages, according to Israeli authorities.
More than 57,500 people have died in Gaza since then because of the bombings and other military operations of Israel, many of them women and children, according to the Ministry of Health of the Territory.
Most of the population of Gaza has also been displaced on multiple occasions.
It is estimated that more than 90% of the houses are damaged or destroyed; Medical, water, sanitation and hygiene systems have collapsed; And there is a shortage of food, fuel, medications and shelter.
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