After multiple attempts to expel Palestinians from Gaza since the war began in October 2023, Israel's latest effort to rebrand mass displacement as "free movement" appears aimed at winning foreign backing for a policy that would otherwise constitute a war crime.
Israeli security officials were recently told to stop using the phrase “voluntary migration” when discussing Gaza's population, Israel’s Channel 13 reported in late June, citing officials who hope a softer name will make the underlying plan easier for foreign governments to accept.
The rebrand came just days after National Security Council chief Shmuel Ben Ezra convened an emergency meeting on “encouraging emigration” from Gaza.
In the meeting, Mossad representatives reportedly admitted they had not found a single country willing to receive Gazans. The timing was also awkwardly at odds with a US-GCC joint statement from 25 June, which said no one will be forced to leave Gaza, and that anyone who does leave is free to return.
“The whole story, since before the war began, is about displacement,” Jehad Malaka , a political researcher at the Palestinian Planning Centre, told The New Arab . “The war simply provided the opportunity to pursue a long-deferred Israeli ambition.”
Renaming the plan, or shelving and reviving pieces of it, doesn't change its content, he said, and doesn't lessen what would be considered a war crime under international humanitarian law.
A plan that keeps changing its name
Israel has already tried to sell the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza both regionally and internationally but has failed, said Malaka.
“Israel tried to market the idea of displacement, but the world refused to take in refugees. Now it's trying to reformulate the idea, hoping the concept gets laundered - but this attempt is doomed to fail, because states are more conscious of the real goal at this stage.”
Khaldoun Barghouti, an analyst on Israeli affairs, called the rebrand a change in tone, not strategy. “It has nothing to do with altering the strategic objective of displacing the Palestinian population of Gaza,” he told The New Arab .
“It's a softening of public messaging meant to ease international pressure. Instead of ‘displacement,’ it becomes ‘freedom of movement’ and ‘voluntary emigration.’”
Israel has yet to announce an operational mechanism for displacement, Barghouti said, but the search for one continues. He suspects there may be undisclosed arrangements with other governments.
The renamed plan stems from the governing coalition's politics in Israel, said Barghouti. “Gaza's displacement is at the top of the agenda for hardline figures in Netanyahu's government: Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and Daniella Weiss,” he said. “For those politicians who talk about settling in Syria and Lebanon, displacing Gaza is almost self-evident.”
Renewed military strikes in Gaza could make displacement more likely. Netanyahu could resume full-scale war and occupy the rest of Gaza if his political survival is at stake, said Barghouti, even at the cost of friction with the Trump administration. He could declare a state of emergency to extend his government's tenure.
“That would mean a return to violent displacement as well, if control over the rest of Gaza is completed,” he said. “Publicly, there are no operational procedures for displacement. But what's happening on the ground amounts to steps toward that goal.”
Hassan Hammad, a human rights researcher, said the rebrand is meant to evade international legal repercussions. The terminology shift, he told The New Arab , is “pure linguistic manipulation of what is a complete war crime. One that changes neither legal fact nor moral responsibility”.
International law is explicit on the issue, he points out. The Fourth Geneva Convention's Article 49 prohibits the forcible transfer of protected persons - individually or en masse - from occupied territory, regardless of the motive stated.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) , meanwhile, classifies deportation or forcible transfer of a population as both a crime against humanity (Article 7) and a war crime (Article .
"On that basis," Hammad said, "human rights and UN institutions treat these acts as crimes warranting international criminal prosecution of occupation leaders, not merely political violations."
Nowhere to go
Whatever Israel calls the plan, it faces a major stumbling block: no country has agreed to take in Gaza's population.
With two million Palestinians, resettlement would be politically and economically costly for any receiving state.
“Israel has refused to bear any of that cost itself. And any government that participates risks exposure under international law, since forced displacement is treated as a serious crime,” he said.
Some European countries have laws allowing family reunification for citizens with first-degree relatives in Gaza, he said, but implementation moves slowly, out of fear of being accused of facilitating displacement.
Malaka credits Egypt for blocking the plan early in the war. “The world currently rejects the idea of displacement, and Egypt’s decision was decisive, which foiled the plan at the start of the war, when it closed its border at Rafah and prevented the displacement of hundreds of thousands into Sinai,” he said.
But that won’t necessarily stop it from happening indefinitely, he said.
It’s also not the first time Israel has tried to rebrand its displacement campaign.
Since October 2023, Israel has floated the idea of pushing Palestinians into Sinai, has tied departures to an exit-must-equal-return arrangement at the Rafah crossing after seizing it in May 2024, and has backed Trump's February 2025 ' Gaza Riviera' proposal to relocate two million people to third countries.
In whatever way it's packaged, states are reluctant to violate the Geneva Conventions' Common Article 1, which implies that states cannot encourage war crimes, even indirectly. In other words, facilitating displacement could be seen as abetting ethnic cleansing.
By rejecting the plan at the outset, Egypt and Jordan set a strong early precedent for the plan’s rejection internationally, Malaka said.
The plan faces two main barriers, said Barghouti: “No host state, and continued reluctance from the US and European governments to align openly with a declared displacement policy.”
He argues that Israel is “politically, militarily, legally, and even at the popular level” prepared to displace Gaza's population, and if it succeeds there, it will become a “template for displacing the West Bank next”.
'Engineering an unliveable life'
The humanitarian collapse inside Gaza is not incidental, the analysts said. It’s meant to make displacement more likely.
At play is a larger strategy, said Malaka: to squeeze the population as much as possible, however possible. That’s what drives Israel’s years-long blockade and policies that restrict reconstruction materials and essential items like food and medicine. It’s also why Israel continues to hold seized territory behind the “yellow line,” an area that covers 70% of the Strip .
OCHA estimated in October 2025 that 81 percent of the Strip’s built structures have been damaged, many completely destroyed. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that more than 43,000 people in Gaza have sustained life-changing injuries.
The killing hasn't stopped either. Despite the October 2025 ceasefire, the UN human rights office recorded more than 700 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces over the following six months.
“Israel wants to bring people in Gaza to the point where they ask the world to intervene with Israel to let them leave to save their lives,” he said.
The restrictions on life in Gaza are designed with displacement in mind, said Barghouti. The “scorched earth” approach strips it of everything needed to sustain life or permit residents to return, turning parts of Gaza into heaps of rubble, he said - encouraging displacement.
Last February OCHA reported that less than half the water Israel supplies to Gaza City through the Mekorot pipeline was actually reaching residents. Most of what does reach people isn't safe, as 97% of Gaza's water is unfit for human consumption by WHO standards, and UNRWA has linked a rise in hepatitis A cases directly to contaminated water supplies.
“When you cut off water and food, destroy hospitals and health and educational infrastructure, and bomb homes over the heads of their residents, any resulting population movement cannot be called voluntary migration or free movement; it is the product of a coercive, expelling environment,” said Hammad
That’s why international law does not recognise consent extracted under starvation or armed force, said Hammad. Whatever name is used for a population’s departure, the legal responsibility is the same.
“Some call this ‘silent displacement’ which means a forced transfer carried out through non-military means,” he said.
Making sure the displacement campaign fails requires more than just tough-sounding words, said Hamad.
Real steps are needed, like Security Council action under Chapter VII of the UN Charter , continued support for International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants , an expansion of South Africa's case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to explicitly address ethnic cleansing, and a refusal by UN agencies to take part in any logistical arrangement that could be read as facilitating the emptying of areas under the cover of humanitarian evacuation.
Israel may eventually use so-called “humanitarian cities” behind the yellow line as a transit point to move people west to east and eventually out of Gaza, said Malaka.
Even so, the analyst insists that Gazans remain attached to their land and have no intention of leaving. What he rejects is the notion of “steadfastness” as an empty slogan, one that asks people to simply endure indefinitely without any real change in conditions.
To him, that framing is disconnected from the reality facing two million people who have lost everything.
Mohamed Solaimane is a Gaza-based journalist with bylines in regional and international outlets, focusing on humanitarian and environmental issues
This piece is published in collaboration with Egab .
Edited by Charlie Hoyle