This Is Ethnic Cleansing—Call It What It Is

Israel’s so-called “humanitarian city” is not a city, and it is certainly not humanitarian. It is an internment camp by another name. A vast open-air prison designed to forcibly concentrate the Palestinian population of Gaza before deporting them. They are not building peace. They are building a prison, one designed to herd Palestinians into ghettos, fence them in, and call it aid. The blueprint is ethnic cleansing.

Let’s not mince words. What Israeli defence minister Israel Katz has announced is a crime against humanity, openly and without euphemism. Not merely a war crime in the fog of battle, not a rogue act of military excess, but a deliberate, state-led programme to erase a people from their land. The goal is simple: remove Palestinians from Gaza, destroy what remains of their homes, and rebrand the rubble as a holding pen. Internment first. Transfer later.

Katz says this is about security. But he speaks like a jailer, not a diplomat. Six hundred thousand Palestinians are to be rounded up and corralled into what remains of Rafah, subjected to “security screenings,” denied freedom of movement, and controlled by the Israeli military. There is no exit. There is no future, and eventually, according to Katz, there will be no Gaza Strip at all.

That this is happening in the open, discussed in press briefings and whitewashed in diplomatic language, is no less horrifying for its transparency. As Michael Sfard, a leading Israeli human rights lawyer, puts it: “(Katz) laid out an operational plan for a crime against humanity.” The plan to render Gaza uninhabitable, to drive people south, and then out (under threat, under blockade, under bombs) is nothing less than a textbook case of population transfer.

They are calling it voluntary. But what is voluntary about mass starvation? What is voluntary about being bombed out of your home, denied medicine, food, water, or electricity, and then told you can leave “if you like”? Coercion under the threat of annihilation is not consent. It’s extortion at the level of existence.

While Netanyahu grins his way through meetings in Washington, while Trump dangles emigration plans like favours to be traded, Rafah is being prepped for mass internment. This is not a holding site for aid. It is not a temporary relocation zone. It is a staging ground for ethnic cleansing. Professor Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust historian, does not mince words: “This is a concentration camp or a transit camp for Palestinians before they expel them.”

The brutal irony is that Israel just weeks ago told its own courts that no such displacement was occurring. The military claimed it was acting only to protect civilians. That lie is now exposed. Katz’s statements contradict the military’s official line. This is not protection. It is preparation. For transfer, for deportation, for the erasure of a people.

What happens to those who refuse? What happens when Palestinians resist being herded into this dystopian “city”? Goldberg again: “What will happen if the Palestinians will not accept this solution and revolt, because they are not completely helpless?” What then? More bombs? More mass graves disguised as security operations? The logic is not containment, just more erasure.

Now, as if to compound the moral obscenity, it has emerged that Tony Blair’s thinktank was involved however “informally”in conversations around the Gaza reconstruction scheme being pushed by Israeli business elites and US consultants. A proposal dripping with dystopian fantasy: a “Trump Riviera”, an “Elon Musk manufacturing zone”, highways named after Gulf monarchs. A vision of Gaza as a luxury resort once its population has been (let’s use their own language) paid to leave.

The Blair Institute insists it was merely observing, as if being in the room while a crime is plotted absolves you of complicity. That it was “on calls,” not drawing up slides. But even this proximity is shameful. Blair, a man whose reputation in the Middle East is already soaked in the blood of Iraq and whose post–prime ministerial role was to broker peace, now finds his institute tangled in the architecture of displacement and profiteering. Whatever the denials, the whiff of complicity lingers. When technocrats and former statesmen sit in rooms discussing how to rebuild a strip of land without its people, they are not neutral observers. They are writing footnotes to a crime.

The world has seen this before. In another century, under another occupation, these were called ghettos. They were framed as temporary, necessary, even humane. They were surrounded by walls and soldiers. Movement was restricted. Aid was rationed. And eventually, they became the launchpads for mass deportation and extermination. Katz may call it a “humanitarian city,” but history has a better word: ghetto.

This is not a theoretical threat. The machinery of removal is already in motion. The international community, and especially Israel’s allies in Washington and London, must be forced to confront what is unfolding: an apartheid regime engaged in the forced displacement of a civilian population, under the guise of humanitarian aid.

Palestinians have lived under siege, bombardment, and occupation for decades. Now they are being asked to accept imprisonment as a gift. But the mask has slipped. This is no humanitarian gesture. It is what the historian Rashid Khalidi calls a settler-colonial logic of elimination. Not a conflict, not a security dilemma, but a long campaign to replace one people with another.

The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s $2 billion “transit camp” project, reportedly discussed with the Trump administration, is part of this broader design. Whether or not they authored the slides, the fact that such schemes are circulating in the White House reveals a shared appetite for demographic engineering. Cloaked, as ever, in technocratic language.

Let’s call this what it is: forced transfer, mass internment, ethnic cleansing. If the phrase “Never Again” is to mean anything, it must apply not just to the past but to the present. And it must apply to all people.

The Israeli government is building a prison atop the ruins it created, and it wants the world to thank it for its generosity.