GAZA, (Palestine Foundation Information Center) The Center for Political and Development Studies (CPDS) issued a position paper on Thursday addressing the recently announced Israeli plan to establish what is being called “Tent City” in the southern Gaza Strip. According to statements by Israeli Army Minister Yisrael Katz, the plan aims to gather around 600,000 displaced Palestinians in a confined area in the city of Rafah, after subjecting them to security screening and preventing them from leaving.
The paper, titled “Tent City in Rafah: A Model of Mass Detention or Forced Displacement?”, asserts that this project is not a humanitarian response to the widespread displacement in Gaza, but rather an extension of a policy of forced demographic engineering aimed at dismantling the geographic and demographic fabric of the Strip and imposing new on-the-ground realities that could be used in post-war arrangements.
The paper emphasizes that if implemented, the plan would amount to a crime of forced displacement and illegal mass detention, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law, and would place the occupation government under the scope of international criminal responsibility—especially since the plan is tied to pre-set security classifications aimed at controlling the fate of Palestinian citizens and their right to movement and return.
The paper also offers an analytical comparison between the proposed “Tent City” and some of the characteristics of the concentration camps established by the Nazi regime in Germany, warning against the reproduction of the logic of segregation and collective control under the guise of “humanitarian management” of the population, using tools such as security screening and tents in devastated, uninhabitable areas.
The paper further highlights several underlying objectives of the Israeli plan, including: emptying the northern and central areas of Gaza, weakening Palestinian social identity, monopolizing geographic control, and securing a bargaining chip to manipulate “the day after” arrangements once the war ends.
The paper recommends a series of urgent actions, most notably: diplomatic and legal pressure to immediately halt the plan, the formation of an independent international investigative committee to document violations, and the rejection of any form of continued occupation presence in the “Morag” axis.
It also calls for strengthening media awareness campaigns to protect citizens’ consciousness and prevent them from falling into the occupation’s schemes, while urging the international community to guarantee the right of Gaza’s residents to return and live freely and with dignity, far from policies of isolation and coercive control.
The CPDS concluded its paper by stressing that the real danger lies not only in the establishment of the “Tent City” itself, but in its potential use as a permanent model for managing Gaza’s population through policies of mass detention and deprivation of rights—calling for immediate action by all Palestinian and international parties to prevent the implementation of this dangerous plan.
