On 7 July Israel’s defence minister presented the outline of a plan. Israel Katz explained to local journalists that he had instructed the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to prepare what he called a “humanitarian city”, into which about 600,000 Gazans would be moved “voluntarily”. This “humanitarian city” would be built on top of the destroyed city of Rafah, in south Gaza, and eventually be home to the entire civilian population of the Strip. Those entering the area would be screened in order to weed out Hamas militants, said Katz, and would not be able to leave once admitted.
With talks ongoing in Doha, a ceasefire in Gaza might be imminent – even a permanent one. This would end a 21-month war, the longest in Israel’s history, that has killed at least 58,000 Palestinians according to Gaza’s health ministry – a number many experts believe to be a gross undercount. But while the end of the war may be in sight, the proposal from Israel’s ministry of defence suggests that a stable, safe future for Gaza is still a distant prospect.
The plan has been met with considerable backlash. Even before the war, Gaza was one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert has said that the proposal – which would concentrate the population of Gaza into a purpose-built camp in an area the fraction of the size of the enclave – describes a “concentration camp”. Some of Israel’s most respected international law scholars, meanwhile, issued an open letter saying that “any directive to prepare or advance the establishment of a ‘humanitarian city’ in Gaza constitutes a manifestly illegal order” and that, if implemented, “the plan would constitute a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and under certain conditions, could amount to the crime of genocide”.
Conditions within the “city” would not be managed by the IDF, Katz said, though the military would “provide security from a distance”. This raised the spectre that the proposed camp would be run in much the same way as Gaza’s new aid delivery sites: with deadly force. In May, when Israel’s full blockade on the Strip was partially lifted, a US-backed organisation called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was set up with help from the Israeli authorities, began distributing aid to Gazans at just four locations, replacing the 400 aid points previously overseen, in part, by the UN.
The scarcity of the sites not only requires Palestinians to travel long distances to receive food and other aid, but also forces them to stand in fenced-in, chaotic queues with thousands of other desperate people. The IDF patrols these distribution sites and, according to Gaza’s health ministry, more than 600 people have been killed by Israeli forces while trying to get aid since May. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation says no shootings have taken place in the vicinity of its operations, but an investigation published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 27 June revealed IDF officers and soldiers say they have been ordered to fire at “unarmed crowds” around these sites. “It’s a killing field,” one soldier said. Both Benjamin Netanyahu and Katz called the report “blood libel”.
Some media outlets have floated the possibility that Katz’s proposal is not so much a concrete plan as it is a negotiating tactic, intended to pressure Hamas to bend to Israel’s ceasefire demands. Yet Haaretz reported on 14 July that Netanyahu and other government ministers were angered by the IDF’s suggestion that the “humanitarian city” would take up to a year to build and could cost billions. In a cabinet meeting on 13 July, the prime minister reportedly demanded a more efficient plan.
Even if the proposal is a tactic to force Hamas to negotiate, it doesn’t seem to be working: at the time of writing, Israel and Hamas are still struggling to reach an agreement. Husam Badran, a senior member of Hamas, has said the camp plans were a “deliberately obstructive demand” that were impeding ceasefire negotiations. “This would be an isolated city that resembles a ghetto,” he told the New York Times. “This is utterly unacceptable, and no Palestinian would agree to this.”
The broad contours of a ceasefire have already been established in a US proposal: a two-month truce, in which talks to forge a permanent ceasefire would continue. Half of the remaining 50 hostages still in Gaza, including some of the 20 who are thought to still be alive, would be released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Yet sticking points beyond the proposed camp in Rafah remain: Israel demands that the much-diminished Hamas agrees to fully disarm and its political leadership is exiled; Hamas wants guarantees that the ceasefire will be made permanent and that Israel will not resume the war after a brief pause.
For all the reported resistance from Hamas in negotiations, critics of Netanyahu have suggested that it is he who is stalling in an effort to placate the far-right ministers within his fragile coalition who oppose any ceasefire at all. There is speculation that the Israeli prime minister wants to drag out talks until 27 July, when Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, breaks for summer, and it would become more difficult for ministers to collapse the government. Though Netanyahu travelled to Washington earlier this month, where he was pressured by Donald Trump to agree to a deal, an official told the BBC that the trip itself was to buy time. In the absence of agreeing to a peace-deal and swiftly bringing an end to the war, Netanyahu instead nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
[See also: Gaza diary: Amid the rubble]
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This article appears in the 16 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, A Question of Intent