Israel has set up a “special directorate” to facilitate the “emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza, as it steps up its public embrace of the plan by US President Donald Trump for residents to leave the devastated territory.
The new offer, which would include “among other things, special departure arrangements by sea, air, and land”, underscores how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is capitalising on Trump’s proposal, under which the US would take over the coastal enclave shattered by 15 months of war.
The directorate would be set up within the defence ministry, which executes the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and controls all entry and exit points of the Gaza Strip.
In a weekend speech to Jewish-American groups in Jerusalem, Netanyahu described Trump’s proposal as a “common strategy,” and denied that it would amount to ethnic cleansing.
But he has also refused to say if any Palestinian civilians leaving the destroyed enclave would be allowed back, raising the spectre of a permanent displacement and a fresh refugee crisis for Egypt and Jordan.
Trump’s plan — widely condemned in the Arab world — has bolstered Netanyahu’s political standing with the far-right politicians that support his ruling coalition, who see the White House backing their once-fringe position that Palestinians must be expelled from their land to ensure Israeli security.
At the same time, his government also continues to engage in ceasefire talks that proponents hope will bring lasting peace and reconstruction in Gaza, in exchange for the release of all of the remaining hostages captured during the October 7 2023 assault on Israel.
Israel has dispatched a low-level negotiation team to Cairo to convert the current ceasefire into a more lasting truce with Hamas, and its security cabinet held a contentious five-hour meeting into Tuesday morning on the subject.
The duelling objectives of the Netanyahu government have injected fresh uncertainty into whether Israel and Hamas can complete all the phases of the current temporary truce that has allowed a slow trickle of hostages to be released after nearly 500 days in Hamas captivity.
The Israeli military assault on Hamas, which carried out the October 7 attack, has left Gaza largely uninhabitable, with widescale destruction of civilian infrastructure, including homes, hospitals and schools.
Netanyahu has refused to say if those who leave now would ever be allowed back, raising the spectre of a mass displacement of Palestinians that mirrors that of 1948, when 750,00 of them fled war to end up as stateless refugees.
Hamas has signalled its willingness to continue the talks aimed at ending the war, repeating statements that it intended to give up governance of Gaza. But it has also threatened to collapse the ceasefire over various disagreements on the amount of aid Israel is allowing into the enclave, especially on tents and mobile homes for the nearly 2mn displaced Palestinians.
For more Israeli hostages to be released after the initial phase expires in two weeks, Israel and Hamas will have to reach a deal that will see the Israeli army leave Gaza, while at least hundreds, if not thousands, of Hamas fighters remain alive.
The surviving elements of Hamas’s militant brigades have displayed their resilience in carefully choreographed shows of force during the hostage releases — now in its fourth week — displaying their weapons and parading hostages in elaborate televised ceremonies.
Those performances have deepened demands from Netanyahu’s far-right allies to abandon the ceasefire and continue fighting Hamas, despite the danger to the dozens of hostages still in captivity in Gaza.
