Since October 2023, Gaza has been transformed by a relentless campaign of destruction and mass displacement, making forced migration the defining feature of daily life. Humanitarian agencies report that nearly the entire population of the Strip, around 1.9 million people, has been uprooted at least once, while ongoing Israeli military operations continue to trigger fresh waves of evacuation orders and internal flight. This is not merely temporary sheltering; it represents a systematic reorganization of who can live where, and under what material and legal conditions.
Eviction as Policy: The Mechanics of Expulsion
Political logic, not just military necessity, explains the persistence and scale of displacement. Investigations by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reveal a consistent pattern: aerial attacks and ground incursions coordinated with mass evacuation orders, coupled with deliberate obstruction of humanitarian aid. These measures collectively coerce large segments of the population into leaving their homes.
Speaking to Quds News Network, political analyst from Gaza, Dr. Iyad al-Qara emphasizes: “This is not incidental damage. Targeting Gaza City, hospitals, and neighborhoods is part of a broader plan to address what Israel’s far-right calls the (Palestinian problem), forced displacement is not collateral, it is a methodical tool to control who remains and who is pushed out.”
Similarly, Mohammad al-Akhras highlights the strategic purpose of displacement: “Israel is using destruction and forced evacuation not only as war tactics, but as a way to redraw Gaza’s population map. Even if fighting ends, creating buffer zones will prevent a real return.”
Evacuation orders and military advances funnel civilians into southern corridors, where movement, access to resources, and basic survival are strictly regulated. This daily policing embeds displacement into Gaza’s social and demographic fabric, undermining the prospects for a durable return and reshaping the Strip’s political geography.
The Southern Trap: Refuge or Confinement?
The southern envelope, portrayed internationally as a humanitarian refuge, is increasingly functioning as a tool of containment. Towns, refugee camps, and clinics are overwhelmed, infrastructure has collapsed, water is scarce, and hospitals operate beyond capacity. UN agencies warn that the south cannot sustain this demographic burden. For many Gazans, the south has become less a sanctuary and more a constrained holding area.
The Israeli army announced that it was repairing what remains of the European Hospital in southern Gaza, framing the move as a “humanitarian gesture.” But sources inside the hospital told Quds News Network that Israel only allowed limited repairs, far from restoring the facility to full operation. The hospital itself remains empty, located in a designated red zone that civilians cannot access. Many in Gaza fear that Israel’s move is less about aid and more about strategy, using the hospital as bait to push displaced people from the north and center of Gaza into the south, where they risk being crammed into what many believe could be a concentration camp.
Hospitals illustrate the inherent contradiction of Israel’s strategy. Israel has justified strikes by alleging militant use of medical sites, while simultaneously pointing to limited reopenings as evidence of humanitarian concern. Civilians, however, are largely denied safe access. As al-Qara notes: “Labeling hospitals as Hamas bases gave Israel a pretext to bomb them. Then reopening one or two facilities is showcased as benevolence, when in fact it forces people south to survive.”
Lima Bustami, Director of the Legal Unit at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, told Quds News Network that the Israeli announcement “must be understood within its broader context: as part of Israel’s declared plan to displace the residents of Gaza City and the northern Strip, forcing them southward in preparation for the complete takeover of the city and its transformation into ruins.”
This reality turns medical facilities from tools meant to safeguard public health into instruments for entrenching forced displacement, making them part of the wider machinery of genocide. The focus on making limited surface-level repairs to a single hospital, such as the European Hospital, serves largely as propaganda, allowing Israel to rebrand its crimes before global opinion while continuing the systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system.
Documented Forced Transfer and Genocide
Legal experts underline that these measures are not merely tragic—they are unlawful. Dr. Bustami also states: “What is being engineered, confining Palestinians in militarily controlled, uninhabitable zones, stripping them of food, health, and freedom of movement, meets the threshold of genocide under international law. It is the deliberate imposition of conditions designed to destroy a people, in whole or in part.”
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention strictly prohibits forcible transfers of civilians except under narrow humanitarian grounds, conditions clearly absent in Gaza. When coupled with evidence of starvation policies, property confiscation, and militarization of medical facilities, these acts collectively constitute crimes against humanity and potentially genocide.
International Rhetoric Normalizes Ethnic Cleansing
International rhetoric amplifies and normalizes the displacement project. U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposals to resettle Palestinians abroad and transform Gaza into an “AI hub” exemplify a troubling discourse: dispossession framed as modernization. Speaking to Quds News Network, Al-Akhras warns: “When world powers discuss Gaza as empty land for investment, they erase Palestinians as a political subject and turn their removal into an economic opportunity.”
Dr. Iyad al-Qara echoes this view, emphasizing the intentionality of Israel’s strategy: “Targeting neighborhoods, hospitals, and essential infrastructure is part of an organized plan to reduce Palestinian presence and control who remains and who is forced out.”
Dr. Lima Bustami stresses that international law already criminalizes the creation of ghettos or enclaves to isolate a racial group. “The 1973 Apartheid Convention explicitly prohibits the establishment of reserves or ghettos for the geographic isolation of an ethnic group, recognizing them as acts constituting the crime of apartheid,” she explained. She noted that this prohibition was rooted in historical precedents, from South Africa’s Bantustans to the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe. “At Nuremberg, the ghettos were treated as part of systematic persecution within crimes against humanity, and the Yugoslavia Tribunal—through cases such as Krnojelac and Kordić & Čerkez—established that unlawful detention and inhumane confinement can directly amount to persecution.”
Together, these perspectives show how local displacement strategies and global discourses converge to justify, normalize, and incentivize the removal of Palestinians, framing it as a political and economic inevitability rather than a humanitarian catastrophe.
Possible Futures
Two trajectories emerge. One is conditional return: a negotiated framework that guarantees security, reconstruction, and restitution of property, requiring credible international guarantees and robust political settlements. The other is normalization of displacement: restricted return, piecemeal externally managed redevelopment, and a frozen demographic reality that entrenches Palestinian dispossession.
Gaza’s displacement crisis is not a logistical byproduct of war—it is a deliberate strategy with demographic objectives. Reports and testimonies from the ground, combined with the analysis of al-Qara and al-Akhras and Bastami’s legal assessment, make it clear that this is a case of ethnic cleansing by design, crossing into the legal definition of genocide. Without decisive international accountability and rights-based reconstruction, displacement risks becoming permanent.
The choice before the international community is not abstract. Either Palestinians return to their homes, or the world becomes complicit in their replacement. Gaza’s future, life or erasure, will be decided now.
Yasmin Abu Shammala is a Palestinian journalist
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Originally published in Quds News Network