An Israeli soldier stands next to the fence encircling the Gaza Strip, March 18, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Two weeks ago, the right-wing Israeli journalist Yinon Magal posted the following on X: “This time, the IDF intends to evacuate all residents of the Gaza Strip to a new humanitarian zone that will be arranged for long-term stay, will be enclosed, and anyone entering it will first be checked to ensure they are not a terrorist. The IDF will not allow a rogue population to refuse evacuation this time. Anyone remaining outside the humanitarian zone will be implicated. This plan has American backing.”

The very same day, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz released a video statement hinting at something similar. “Residents of Gaza, this is your final warning,” he said. “The Air Force’s attack on Hamas terrorists was just the first step. The next phase will be far harsher, and you will pay the full price. Soon, the evacuation of the population from combat zones will resume.

“If all Israeli hostages are not released and Hamas is not removed from Gaza, Israel will act with unprecedented force,” Katz continued. “Take the advice of the U.S. president: return the hostages and remove Hamas, and other options will open for you — including relocation to other countries for those who wish. The alternative is complete destruction and devastation.”

The parallels between the two statements are clearly no coincidence. Even if Magal did not learn about Israel’s new war plan directly from Katz or the army’s new chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, it is reasonable to assume he heard it from some other senior military sources.

In yet another piece of foreshadowing, journalist Yoav Zitun of Israeli news site Ynet drew attention to remarks made by Brig. Gen. Erez Wiener after his recent dismissal from the army for mishandling classified documents. “It saddens me that after a year and a half of ‘pushing the cart uphill,’ just when it finally seems like we’ve reached the final stretch and the fighting will take the right turn (which should have happened a year ago), I won’t be at the helm,” Wiener wrote on Facebook.

As Zitun noted, Wiener is no ordinary officer. Before his firing, he played a pivotal role in planning the army’s operations in Gaza, where he consistently pushed to impose full Israeli military rule over the territory. If Wiener, who was reportedly implicated in leaks to far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich, says that “the fighting will take the right turn,” one can infer what kind of turn he means. This also aligns with the apparent desires of Chief of Staff Zamir, as well as details of an attack plan that were allegedly leaked to the Wall Street Journal earlier last month.

Israeli tanks seen near the fence encircling the Gaza Strip, March 18, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Connecting all these dots leads to a fairly clear conclusion: Israel is preparing to forcibly displace the entire population of Gaza — through a combination of evacuation orders and intense bombardment — into an enclosed and possibly fenced-off area. Anyone caught outside its boundaries would be killed, and buildings throughout the rest of the enclave would likely be razed to the ground.

Without mincing words, this “humanitarian zone,” as Magal so kindly put it, in which the army intends to corral Gaza’s 2 million residents, can be summed up in just two words: concentration camp. This is not hyperbole; it is simply the most precise definition to help us better understand what we are facing.

 An all-or-nothing principle

Perversely, the plan to establish a concentration camp inside Gaza may reflect Israeli leaders’ realization that the much-touted “voluntary departure” of the population is not realistic in the current circumstances — both because too few Gazans would be willing to leave, even under continued bombardment, and because no country would accept such a massive influx of Palestinian refugees.

According to Dr. Dotan Halevy, a researcher of Gaza and co-editor of the book “Gaza: Place and Image in the Israeli Space,” the concept of “voluntary departure” is based on an all-or-nothing principle. “Consider this hypothetical,” Halevy told me recently. “Ask Ofer Winter [the military general who, at the time of our conversation, looked set to be tasked with heading the Defense Ministry’s “Voluntary Departure Directorate”] whether evacuating 30 percent, 40 percent, or even 50 percent of Gaza’s residents would be considered a success. Would Israel really care if Gaza had 1.5 million Palestinians rather than 2.2 million? Would that enable the annexation fantasies of Bezalel Smotrich and his allies? The answer is almost certainly no.”

Halevy’s book features an essay by Dr. Omri Shafer Raviv exposing Israel’s plans to “encourage” Palestinian emigration from Gaza after the 1967 War. The title, “I Would Like to Hope That They Leave,” borrows a quote from then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Published in January 2023 — a full two years before President Donald Trump would announce his “Gaza Riviera” plan — it reflects how deeply the notion of transferring Gaza’s population has been ingrained in Israeli strategic thinking.

The article reveals Israel’s two-pronged approach to reduce the number of Palestinians in Gaza: first, encouraging them to move to the West Bank, and from there to Jordan; and second, seeking countries in South America willing to absorb Palestinian refugees. While the first strategy saw some success, the second failed completely.

According to Shafer Raviv, the plan ended up backfiring on Israel. Though tens of thousands of Palestinians left Gaza for Jordan after Israel deliberately lowered living standards in the enclave, most of them remained. But crucially, the deteriorating conditions gave rise to unrest — and, as a result, armed resistance.

Israeli soldiers conduct a search in the Gaza Strip, 1969. (Israel Press and Photo Agency/National Library of Israel)

Realizing this, Israel decided by early 1969 to ease the economic situation in the Strip by allowing Gazans to work in Israel, thus relieving the pressure to emigrate. Additionally, Jordan began to close its borders, further slowing Palestinian flight from the Strip. Ironically, some of the Gazans who moved to Jordan as part of Israel’s displacement plan later participated in the Battle of Karameh in March 1968 — the first direct military confrontation between Israel and the nascent Palestinian Liberation Organization which further cooled Israel’s enthusiasm for encouraging emigration from Gaza.

Ultimately, Israel’s security establishment reached the conclusion that it was preferable to contain Palestinians in Gaza, where they could be monitored and controlled, rather than to disperse them across the region. According to Halevy, this perception has guided Israeli policy vis-à-vis Gaza until October 2023, and explains why Israel did not seek to force residents out of the Strip during its 17-year blockade. Indeed, until the start of the war, leaving Gaza was an extremely difficult and costly process, available only to Palestinians with wealth and connections who could reach foreign embassies in Jerusalem or Cairo to obtain visas.

Today, Israeli thinking regarding Gaza has seemingly flipped: from external control and containment to full control, expulsion, and annexation.

In Shafer Raviv’s essay, he recounts a 2005 interview with Maj. Gen. Shlomo Gazit, the architect of Israel’s post-1967 occupation policy and the first head of the army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT). When asked about the original Gaza expulsion plan, which he himself helped formulate 40 years earlier, his response was: “Anyone who talks about this should be hanged.” Twenty years later, with the current right-wing government, the prevailing sentiment is that anyone who doesn’t talk about “voluntary departure” of Gaza’s residents should be hanged.

And yet, despite the dramatic shift in strategy, Israel remains firmly trapped by its own policies. For “voluntary departure” to be sufficiently successful to enable annexation and re-establishment of Jewish settlements in the Strip, one would think that at least 70 percent of Gaza’s residents would have to be removed — meaning more than 1.5 million people. This goal is utterly unrealistic given the current political circumstances, both within Gaza and across the Arab world.

What’s more, as Halevy points out, even discussing such a proposal could reopen the question of freedom of movement in and out of Gaza. After all, if the departure is “voluntary,” Israel would in theory be required to guarantee that those who leave can also return. In an article on the Israeli news site Mako last week, describing a pilot program where 100 Gazans are set to leave the enclave for construction work in Indonesia, it was explicitly stated that “according to international law, anyone who leaves Gaza for work must be allowed to return.”

Whether or not Smotrich, Katz, and Zamir have read Halevy and Shafer Raviv’s articles, they likely understand that “voluntary departure” is not an immediately executable plan. But if they truly believe that the solution to the “Gaza problem” — or to the Palestinian issue as a whole — is for there to be no Palestinians left in Gaza, then it will certainly not be possible all in one go.

In other words, the idea appears to be: first, corral the population into one or more closed-off enclaves; then, let starvation, desperation, and hopelessness do the rest. Those locked inside will see that Gaza has been completely destroyed, that their homes have been leveled, and that they have neither a present nor a future in the Strip. At that point, the Israeli thinking goes, Palestinians themselves will begin pushing for emigration, forcing Arab countries to take them in.

Palestinians at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, April 1, 2025. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

 Obstacles to expulsion

It remains to be seen whether the military — or even the government — is willing to go all the way on such a plan. It would almost certainly lead to the deaths of all the hostages, carrying the potential for major political fallout. Moreover, it would be fiercely resisted by Hamas, which has not lost its military capabilities and could inflict heavy losses on the army, as it did in northern Gaza right up until the final days before the ceasefire.

Other obstacles to such a plan include the exhaustion of Israeli army reservists, with growing concerns about both “silent” and public refusal to serve; the civil unrest being generated by the government’s aggressive efforts to weaken the judiciary will only intensify this phenomenon. It is also firmly opposed (at least for now) by both Egypt and Jordan, whose governments could go as far as suspending or canceling their peace agreements with Israel. Finally, there’s the unpredictable nature of Donald Trump, who one day threatens to “open the gates of hell” on Hamas and the next sends envoys to negotiate with the group directly, calling them “pretty nice guys.”

At present, the Israeli army is continuing to pummel Gaza with airstrikes and seize more territory around the Strip’s perimeter. Israel’s declared goal in its renewed assault is to pressure Hamas into extending phase one of the deal, meaning the release of hostages without committing to ending the war. Hamas, aware of Israel’s strategic limitations, refuses to budge from its position: any hostage deal must be tied to ending the war. Meanwhile, Zamir, who is perhaps genuinely fearful that he won’t have an army left to conquer Gaza, has remained conspicuously quiet, avoiding substantive statements about the military’s intentions.

Still, the combined pressure for a deal — from the population of Gaza, which is demanding for this nightmare to end and turning against Hamas, and from Israeli society, which is exhausted from the war and wants the hostages back — may not lead to a new ceasefire. On Monday, the Israeli army ordered all residents of Rafah to relocate to the so-called “humanitarian zone” in Al-Mawasi; in the Israeli media, this was presented as part of the pressure campaign on Hamas to agree to release the remaining hostages, but it could very well be the first step toward establishing a concentration camp.

Perhaps the government and the military believe that a “voluntary departure” of Gaza’s population will erase Israel’s crimes — that once Palestinians find a better future elsewhere, past actions will be forgotten. The sad truth is that while forced transfer of this scale is not practically feasible, the methods Israel might use to implement it could lead to even graver crimes — concentration camps, systematic destruction of the entire enclave, and possibly even outright extermination.

Meron Rapoport

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