On Sunday, the Israeli military announced a plan to occupy three-quarters of the Gaza Strip. The entire remaining Palestinian population, estimated at around 2 million people, would be forced into an area of just 35 square miles.
The plan is the practical implementation of “Operation Gideon’s Chariots,” which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described as the “concluding moves” of the onslaught in Gaza.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stated that it currently controls 44 percent of the Gaza Strip and plans to expand that control to 75 percent within two months.
The IDF announced plans to establish three “humanitarian zones”—i.e., concentration camps—located along the southern coast, in Gaza City in the north and near Nuseirat in central Gaza.
The IDF stated that its operational focus will shift from targeting individual Hamas fighters to seizing territory and forcibly displacing the Palestinian population.
In a statement on the mass displacement plan, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor wrote:
Israeli forces have issued at least 35 evacuation orders in the Gaza Strip since January of this year, affecting over one million people. These orders compound the harm caused by those issued prior to January, which had already resulted in much of the population being displaced. Israel is now intensifying efforts to confine residents to a narrow area along the southern coast—an apparent prelude to expulsion from the Strip, in line with the “Trump Plan” recently adopted by Netanyahu as a condition for ending military operations in the enclave.
This weekend’s announcement by the IDF coincides with the launch of the US-Israeli “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” which is set to begin distributing food and humanitarian supplies on Monday.
International humanitarian aid agencies have condemned the organization, which the US and Israel aim to use to replace the existing humanitarian network by distributing starvation rations to pre-vetted individuals using facial recognition technology.
The total occupation of Gaza, the transfer of the population to concentration camps and the monopolization of food distribution by the US and Israeli militaries is the essential prelude to their plan for the forcible displacement of the remaining Palestinian population.
On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly said for the first time that the displacement of the Palestinian population from Gaza is an official objective of Israel’s war effort.
Israel, Netanyahu declared in a press conference, “is ready to end the war, under clear conditions that … we carry out the Trump plan. A plan that is so correct and so revolutionary.”
In February, US President Trump declared, “The US will take over the Gaza Strip. ... We’ll own it.” He said the US will “level it out” and that other countries will “build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza.”
Last week, NBC News reported that the United States is in negotiations with Syria and Libya, whose governments it helped to overthrow in Islamist insurgencies, to accept the Palestinian people who are being displaced from Gaza.
Earlier this month, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich spelled out the government’s plan: Within a year, Gaza will be completely destroyed, civilians will be pushed into a “humanitarian zone” in the south, and from there, they will begin leaving en masse for third countries.
In a report published Saturday, the Washington Post explained that the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” was created by a “group of former US intelligence and defense officials and business executives, working in close consultation with Israel.”
According to the Post, it will
hire armed private contractors to provide logistics and security for a handful of aid distribution hubs to be built in southern Gaza. Under the arrangement, which would replace existing aid distribution networks coordinated by the United Nations, Palestinian civilians would have to travel to the hubs and submit to identity checks to receive rations from nongovernmental organizations.
The Post reported on internal planning documents by the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” that anticipated its operations being compared to “concentration camps with biometrics” or being similar to “Blackwater, a former US mercenary firm implicated in violence against civilians in Iraq.”
Gaza’s entire remaining population is on the brink of famine, after Israel blocked nearly all food, fuel and electricity from entering the enclave since March.
Israel is also continuing its daily massacres of civilians, including journalists, doctors and humanitarian workers. On Friday, an Israeli airstrike killed at least seven children of Alaa al-Najjar, a pediatrician at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
On Sunday, Israeli airstrikes killed at least 30 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip. Among the dead was journalist Hassan Majdi Abu Warda, bringing the number of Palestinian journalists killed since October 2023 to 220.
Also Sunday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement that two of its staff members, Ibrahim Eid and Ahmad Abu Hilal, had been killed in an Israeli attack in Khan Younis.
Israeli attacks also killed Ashraf Abu Nar, the operations director of Gaza’s civil defense, and his wife, in a strike on their home in Nuseirat.
To date, 53,900 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli attacks since October 7, 2023, with hundreds of thousands wounded.
In a statement Sunday, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said that 950 children have been killed by Israeli attacks over the past two months. “Children in Gaza are enduring unimaginable suffering,” UNRWA said in a post on X. “They are starving, displaced, and exposed to indiscriminate attacks.”