The ‘humanitarian city’ in southern Gaza

Israel’s controversial plan for a “humanitarian city” in Gaza is a laundered name for a “Transit Gateway to Eviction”.

The vast tent encampment would be built on the ruins of Rafah, south of the Morag Corridor in the southern part of the Gaza Strip bordering Egypt, and will cost the Israeli taxpayer between US $2.7 billion (A $4.1 billion) and US $4 billion (A $6 billion).

It would be managed by undisclosed international organisations and secured by undisclosed military or paramilitary forces in which the IDF will play a secondary role.

The tent city will temporarily house 600,000 displaced Gazans currently sheltering in the Mawasi coastal area, and could eventually become a transit station for the eviction of the territory’s entire two million inhabitants.

Hamas operatives and their accomplices will not be allowed into the closed zone, supplied with water and food, which essentially becomes a waiting station for a one-way exit, which Israeli authorities again euphemistically call “voluntary emigration”’, to countries willing to take in Gaza’s new refugees.

Once inside the zone, Gazans would not be able to return to the place of their former homes in any part of the Gaza Strip. And so they will be denied a basic human right of free movement.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir told cabinet at its meeting on July 14 that the plan is “unworkable”, “has more holes than cheese” and warned that it could undermine the goals of the war and ongoing negotiations for the release of Israeli hostages, even though he would carry out the plan if the government instructed.

This surrealist plan has been internationally criticised by legal experts and human rights organisations as a “concentration camp”. Antisemitic and anti-Israel critics will go further in their Nazi comparisons.

The tent city, almost certainly, will be a vast unbearable and densely populated camp sheltering homeless people who may have wished, but were unable to leave Gaza at any time before, during and after the war. It could be their fourth forced move with their sparse chattels on foot, on the roofs of private cars and vans, and on donkey-drawn carts and wagons from areas declared by the IDF as war zones.

They will live under harsh conditions of heat and dust and later rain and mud in abject poverty, substandard health and sanitary conditions, squalor and malnutrition. They are refugees in their own land; they have no homes to replace those they lost and no livelihood to rebuild in towns and villages that were razed to the ground by intense Israeli bombings of Hamas terrorist tunnels deep under their homes, and the destruction of stockpiles of rockets and their launchers, mortar guns, rifles and hand grenades and small arms. Their destruction has left a trail of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of debris spread across a barren land.

Some assessments say it could take several years to clear the debris. And even if an international consortium of construction companies were assembled to embark on an integrated program of planning, removal of the debris, and building, it would still take many years before displaced Gazans could return. By then, those who resettled may not wish to return.

We don’t know of any Arab or Muslim countries willing to take in displaced Gazans (Egypt and Jordan have opposed resettling Gazans). And if there are such countries will they take in tens of thousands or just a few thousand mostly unskilled people? How will such low numbers help to resettle the remaining overwhelming majority of the two million traumatised Gazans, among them many widowed mothers with infants, orphan children and youth?

And will Israel show compassion by taking in several thousand displaced Gazans to resettle them in Muslim communities in Israel as a gesture of goodwill after the war with Hamas ends?

And then there’s the overriding moral question, who will inherit the Gaza Strip from the displaced Gazans who are resettled elsewhere?

US President Donald Trump has suggested developing the Gaza Strip into a Riveria, like France’s Nice or Australia’s Gold Coast. The world’s billionaires would arrive here in their yachts and stay in luxury hotels built by American tycoons and spend their riches sailing to Mediterranean ports, tanning on Gaza’s beaches, playing tennis and golf, gambling in local casinos and hobnobbing in night clubs and strip shows.

Another idea is to restore the Palestinian Authority’s rule over the Gaza Strip with an advisory team of experts from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia which will also finance and manage the reconstruction of Gaza and its economic recovery.

Israel’s far right Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir want Israel to annex the Gaza Strip and bring in thousands of Israeli settlers to inhabit and cultivate the lands as they did before 2005, when former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the evacuation of 8000 Israeli settlers from 21 farming settlements under his government’s controversial unilateral Disengagement Plan.

In this event, Israel would be obliged to compensate the Gazans for the loss of ownership to their lands.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prefers to put these ideas on hold in favour of an indefinite period of Israeli military government over the Gaza Strip until stability is restored. And then, what?

A former AJN journalist, Yehonathan Tommer has lived in Israel for over 50 years.