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ISRAEL UNVEILS A CONCENTRATION CAMP IN SOUTHERN GAZA  
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Mitchell Plitnick
July 12, 2025
PopularResistance.org
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_ Israel would create a ghetto which would quickly become a
concentration camp on the ruins of the southern Gaza city of Rafah. _

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
speak privately in the Vermeil Room before a dinner, Monday, July 7,
2025, at the White House., Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok.


 

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU VISITED WASHINGTON THIS WEEK TO MEET WITH TRUMP
ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS FOLLOWING THE COUNTRIES’ JOINT ATTACK ON
IRAN. THE LACK OF TRANSPARENCY ABOUT WHAT WAS ACTUALLY DISCUSSED COULD
BE A VERY DANGEROUS SIGN.

It is said that no news is good news. But when the cone of silence is
dropped over meetings between U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it is prudent to be apprehensive
about what we don’t know.

Before Netanyahu’s arrival in Washington, Trump had indicated
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he expected their conversations to be focused almost exclusively on
ending the Gaza “war.” The sickening euphemism aside, the fact
that neither Trump nor Netanyahu are eager to disclose the contents of
their meetings opens a wide range of possibilities.

The optimistic view is that Netanyahu is attempting to find a way to
accommodate the President’s stated desire to end the genocide in
Gaza without causing a rupture in his governing coalition. This view
is bolstered by reports of intensive meetings in Doha
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the U.S., Israel, and mediators from Qatar and Egypt speaking on
behalf of Hamas.

According to those reports, there has been progress on a ceasefire
deal, although they did not echo Trump’s earlier optimism
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an agreement could have been reached this week. Trump has reportedly
even extended his guarantee
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Hamas that he would not allow Israel to resume the genocide at the end
of the 60-day ceasefire period.

It hardly seems wise for Hamas to stake so much on the word of a man
who lies as a matter of course. But it is also the case that Trump is
sympathetic to Netanyahu’s concern that his government would
collapse if he implicitly agreed to a longer-term ceasefire, and Hamas
is facing increasing desperation in Gaza as more and more Palestinians
starve and are gunned down by Israeli and American forces. As has been
the case for a long time, the Palestinians, including Hamas, are
forced to choose from a short list of terrible options, and they have
to hope that Trump recognizes that restraining Israel is in his best
interest.

They have little choice but to cling to that hope as other
possibilities are grimmer.

The Rafah concentration camp

On Monday, the Israeli military’s Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir told an
Israeli court
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the Israeli armed forces only “recommends and facilitates the
evacuation of civilians in combat zones for their protection, as long
as IDF operational activity continues in the area,” an obvious lie
Zamir was forced to put forth in response to a petition brought by
Israeli reservists charging that they were being ordered to carry out
war crimes in the form of forced displacement.

As if to clarify the falsehood of the COS’ claim, Israeli Defense
Minister Israel Katz announced, on the very same day,
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Israel would create a ghetto which would quickly become a
concentration camp on the ruins of the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

Initially, the camp, which Katz obscenely referred to as a
“humanitarian city,” would house some 600,000 Palestinians, mostly
from the so-called “safe zone” at al-Mawasi
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a zone where Palestinians have been treated as fish in a barrel,
regularly gunned down and bombed in their “safe zone.” Eventually,
more, perhaps even all, of Gaza’s population would be forced into
this “humanitarian city.”

Before the genocide began, the population of Rafah and its surrounding
area was approximately 275,000
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and it was overcrowded then

It is in this context that Netanyahu’s comments
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dinner with Trump need to be understood:

“I think President Trump had a brilliant vision. It’s called free
choice. You know, if people want to stay, they can stay. But if they
want to leave, they should be able to leave. It shouldn’t be a, you
know, prison, it should be an open place and give people free choice.
We’re working with the United States very closely about finding
countries that will seek to realize what they always say, that they
want to give the Palestinians a better future. And those who — and I
think we’re — we’re getting close to finding several countries.
And I think this will give, again, the freedom to choose. Palestinians
should have it. And I hope that we can secure it.”

A choice to stay in Gaza means staying in a territory under total
siege, that has been almost completely destroyed, which cannot sustain
a population, can’t provide water for a small city, let alone some
two million people. To call this a free choice is beyond dishonest. It
is, itself, murderous.

Netanyahu, and Trump as well, can talk all they’d like about how
other countries would take in Palestinians fleeing Gaza, but there is
little substance to these conversations. We’ve been hearing for
months that “numerous countries” are just about to agree to take
in Palestinians being driven out of Gaza. It’s simply a lie.

Forget any Arab state, none of which could possibly agree to such a
thing, regardless of the American bribes that went with it. Other
states that have been suggested would be almost as unlikely to agree.
South Sudan was one proposed destination. That is a country currently
experiencing intense civil strife, where a civil war could break out
at any time. True, Trump has apparently gotten away with
deporting eight immigrants from the United States to South Sudan
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one of the deportees is actually from South Sudan), but that is very
different from adding large numbers of refugees into a country already
facing not only intense civil strife
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also a growing humanitarian crisis
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exacerbated by a long term cholera outbreak.

No, what Israel intends is what many have been warning about ever
since the forced relocations inside Gaza began, shortly after the
start of the genocide: concentrating Gaza’s population into one or
just a few tiny areas of the Strip and creating a crisis where the
people will either die or be so desperate that they will call for
relocation. Given the Palestinians’ attachment to their home and the
dearth of real alternatives, the former is much more likely.

Trump doesn’t seem to oppose that idea in theory, but he wants a way
forward in Gaza to enhance his imagined reputation as a peacemaker and
to alleviate some of the popular pressure being felt in both the
United States and Europe.

Netanyahu’s and Trump’s goals in Gaza are obviously incompatible.
As such, there can be some “progress” in ceasefire talks, but
ultimately, Israel will not be willing to withdraw from Gaza or
consider a permanent end to the genocide, so talks will inevitably
“fall apart.” It’s the same script that has been repeated over
and over in Gaza since late October 2023, when Hamas offered to free
every hostage
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a comprehensive prisoner exchange and end of fighting. Neither Trump
nor Netanyahu is eager for the public to be reminded of that bit of
recent history.

Netanyahu’s goals in Washington

At their first dinner in the White House, Netanyahu made a show of
handing Trump a copy of his letter recommending the president for the
Nobel Peace Prize, an obsession for Trump. Setting aside the
perversity of a war criminal dodging an arrest warrant from the
International Criminal Court, nominating an aspiring dictator for this
recognition (however tarnished the Nobel prize has become), the
presentation was obviously intended to flatter Trump and to do so as
publicly as Netanyahu could. What was he hoping to get from Trump by
buttering him up in this fashion?

Part of the show was an attempt at a victory lap. Netanyahu and Trump
both want to be able to reap political benefits from the idea that
Iran’s nuclear program was destroyed without sparking a major Middle
East war.

The trouble is, Iran’s nuclear program wasn’t destroyed
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though the U.S. and Israel inflicted heavy damage not only to Iran’s
nuclear facilities but also to many other military and civilian sites
as well. And the U.S. and Israel are not on the same page
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where to go from here.

Trump knows he angered his own base by attacking Iran, and that they
forgave him only because his actions have not yet embroiled the U.S.
in another Middle East quagmire. He has no desire to push his luck.

Netanyahu, on the other hand, has been striving for a regime change
war against Iran, and is only more determined to get one now
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push Trump into military action.

This disagreement is already playing out in public. While
Trump continues to insist
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his strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, Israel has
gone public with its assessment
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can rebuild
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Netanyahu continues to call Iran a “cancer
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be dealt with.

As Israel goes further in contradicting Trump, the disagreement will
likely come to a head, and much will depend on how Trump’s own
people respond to Israel making these claims.

But on this trip, the focus was on Gaza, and it seems clear that
neither Trump nor Netanyahu came away from their meetings with all
they wanted. Trump had hoped to announce a new ceasefire, but instead
has retreated from his earlier certainty
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getting one.

Netanyahu leaves the meetings with a somewhat better hand. He thwarted
the effort to secure a ceasefire, and at least to this point, Trump
doesn’t seem to be threatening to blame Israel when the talks
inevitably fall apart.

But that might not hold. Trump has made it clear that he will publicly
blame Israel if he gets angry at their actions, as he did
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Israel tried to break the ceasefire with Iran. “There’s nothing
definite about war and Gaza,” Trump told reporters
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“But there’s a very good chance that we’ll have…an agreement
of some kind this week and maybe next week, if not.” That statement
puts the onus on both parties.

Netanyahu did not see any American movement on his goals for pursuing
regime change in Iran, nor did he get any public indication that the
United States was ready to put all the blame on Hamas when the
ceasefire talks fail. There was no indication that the U.S. would side
with Israel on the issue of a broader redeployment of Israeli troops,
for example. Indeed, the U.S. was reported to have pressed Israel
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modify its initial position on redeployment, and it did so.

While that decision saved the talks from collapsing completely, they
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the redeployment, the distribution of humanitarian aid, and guarantees
that Israel would not do what it did during the previous ceasefire,
namely return to genocide as soon as it could and never truly
negotiate toward an ending as it had committed to do.

It is entirely possible that there were private discussions between
Netanyahu and Trump whose effects we might come to see in the coming
days. But as things stand now, Netanyahu leaves Washington with the
status quo intact. For him, that’s something of a victory, given the
anticipation that Trump might want to press him harder on a ceasefire
in Gaza. But it does nothing to relieve the growing pressure
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him domestically to end a genocide that has significantly damaged
Israel’s standing in the world.

* Gaza
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* concentration camps
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