“Apparently illegal”: In Katz ‘Plan for Gaza “Humanitarian City”, experts see the war crime

Defense Minister Israel Katz’s proposal to build a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of the southern Gazan city of Rafah and to broadcast the entire civilian population in Gaza has triggered massive criticism from both Israel and abroad.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that such a city would represent a “concentration camp”, while the leading Israeli experts had warned of international rights that the implementation of the plan could represent a number of war crimes and crimes against humanity and lead to a form of genocide.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the IDF military lawyers IDF chief Eyal Zamir announced that the plan would be illegal if it forced the Palestinian civilian population to the zone and prevents them from leaving.

What is Katz ‘plan?

In a briefing to reporter last week, Katz said that he had instructed the IDF and the Ministry of Defense to drive plans for a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah.

According to Katz ‘Vision, the entire civilian population of Gaza – more than 2 million people – would finally be limited to this zone.

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Palestinians who enter the city would be checked to ensure that Hamas employees do not receive access and nobody is allowed to go, said Katz.

The Palestinians gather on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 1, 2025 (AFP) for a common Iftar or a quick meal. (AFP)

The Defense Minister also emphasized that it was his ambition to encourage the Palestinians to “voluntarily emigrate from the Gaza Strip to other countries”.

A security cabinet seats on Sunday, in which cat, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other high -ranking ministers and defense officers took part, saw discussions about the implementation of the plan. The meeting reported that IDF officials estimate that it would take a year to cost up to 20 billion nis (5.9 billion US dollars) for a year.

According to the Hebrew media reports, Netanyahu was angry to the time frame and the costs of the military and asked the officials to present a “more realistic” proposal.

“It has to be shorter, cheaper and more practical,” said Netanyahu, according to Ynet at the meeting.

Forced movement and international law

The fourth Geneva Convention and the Habitic Act generally prohibit the “mass transmission” and deportation of a civilian population, although they allow evacuations for the security of this population or for “imperative military reasons”.

The Geneva Convention also provides that such evacuations must be temporary, which says that evacuated people must be attributed to their houses “as soon as the hostility has stopped in the area in question”.

If evacuations are carried out, the civilian population must be provided with proper accommodation, and the evacuations must “be carried out under satisfactory conditions of hygiene, health, security and nutrition”.

Mohammed Hanieh, a thirteen-year-old Palestinian boy, from whom his family suffers from malnutrition, is located on a couch in his family house in the Bureij refugee camp in the refugee camp of the Central Gaza Strip (Eyad Baba / AFP) on April 12, 2025. (Eyad Baba / AFP).

In addition, the Rome statute, the founding document of the International Criminal Court (ICC), “illegal deportation or transfer or illegal restriction” as war crimes and “deportation or forced transfer of the population” as a crime against humanity.

Israel is not a signator of the Rome statute and argues that the ICC has no responsibility for its nationals. The topic itself is currently being checked in the ICC even after the court’s decision, arrest warrants against Netanyahu and the former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

A strong warning

Last week, 16 Israeli scholars and lecturers of Israeli law wrote a letter to Katz and Zamir, in which copies were sent to the Attorney General and others to warn of “the clear and explicit illegality to concentrate on the plan of the population of Gaza”.

The implementation, they said, would represent war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The letter was signed by Eyal Benvenisti, formerly the Cambridge University, who was one of the experts who defended Israel in the murder proceedings that South Africa brought against him at the International Court of Justice.

Other prominent signatories were Yuval Shany from the Law of the Hebrew University, who submitted Amicus letter to the defense of Israel in the ICC and David Kretzmer, Eliav Liebich, Tamar Megiddo and others.

In their letter, the right -wing experts pointed out that the planned evacuations did not come from a certain area of hostilities in Gaza, but from the entire territory and in question questioned the “imperative military necessity” of the plan. They also emphasized that no “legitimate consideration of protection or military necessity” was presented to justify the plan.

The Israeli academics also stated that the condition of the infrastructure in Rafah, which was essentially directed to the ground during the war, is not sufficient to provide even the 600,000 people who would initially be moved into the zone, minimally humanitarian or hygienic conditions.

They also found that Katz had said that the encouragement of the “voluntary emigration” of the Gaza Strip from the territory was a specific part of his plan.

Defense Minister Israel Katz near the border with the Gaza Strip, January 19, 2025 (Ariel Hermoni/Ministry of Defense)

This would violate the provisions of the Geneva Convention that evacuated people can return to their houses as soon as possible. It can also undermine every claim that the evacuations or deportations to the humanitarian city are designed for the security of the civilian population or are an important military necessity.

“In our view, this plan is an evacuation in the legal sense, but the establishment of a mass levy, the main purpose of which is ethnic cleaning and designation,” wrote the academics.

They said that Katz ‘plan would therefore represent the crimes against the humanity of deportation or the violent transmission, severe deprivation of physical freedom and the persecution of an identifiable group according to the Rome statute.

“There is also a high risk that the crime of annihilation due to the likelihood of living conditions that lead to the destruction of the population added the academies when the dark humanitarian conditions in Gaza in Gaza Strip and in particular when the population is pushed into a small area.

The academics also warned that the “concentration of civilians under extreme density and existing humanitarian conditions” as a “deliberate inflammation of the group of living conditions that were calculated in order to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, one of the definitions of the 1948 genocide convention, which is a game.

And they stated that every guideline to implement the plan would be “an obviously illegal arrangement” that should be rejected.

The Amnesty International Rights Organization, which said, was similarly critical that plans for the “resettlement” of the Palestinians within Gaza or deportation outside the Gaza would make the war crimes of illegal transmission or deportation against their will.

Former Prime Minister Olmert described the proposal as a “concentration camp” and argued that he should facilitate a plan for the ethnic cleaning of the Palestinians from Gaza.

“If you build a warehouse in which you [plan to] “clean” more than half of the Gaza Strip, then the inevitable understanding of the strategy of it [is that] It’s not to be saved [Palestinians]. It is to deport them, push them and throw them away. There is no other understanding that I have at least, ”said the former prime minister.