Trucks carrying medical aid supplies are received by the Gaza-based Health Ministry in Khan Yunis on Monday. Bashar Taleb/AFP/Getty Images

The United States hopes to get more than 500 trucks a day of humanitarian aid into Gaza during the ceasefire, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Wednesday.

“The critical thing that we believe the ceasefire unlocks is a real solution to that last mile distribution problem that we have had, that humanitarian organizations have had in Gaza,” Miller said at a press briefing.

Miller noted that it has been “very difficult” to distribute aid within Gaza because of the security situation. He said, “aid will be distributed through our humanitarian partners, largely the UN agencies that are there on the ground and other nonprofit, non-governmental organizations.”

“There are broad agreements that we have worked out with some of the humanitarian partners,” Miller said, adding that there are other details that have to be worked out. He confirmed the Thursday meeting in Cairo, which CNN reported earlier Wednesday.

Asked if there will be any reconstruction done to assist with the aid distribution, given the level of destruction within Gaza, Miller said that the first phase of the ceasefire is “really just a stabilization and recovery before you can even get to reconstruction.”

Miller acknowledged that a lot of humanitarian infrastructure has been destroyed, but said that “there are still warehouses that exist in Gaza.”

“Some of the warehouses that exist haven’t been destroyed, but aid organizations haven’t been able to get to them because of the security situation,” he said. “We think they’ll be able to turn those warehouses back on, we believe they’ll be able to surge the number of trucks that go in and the number of trucks that move around.”

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Two weeks ago, the right-wing Israeli journalist Yinon Magal posted the following on X: “This time, the IDF intends to evacuate all residents of the Gaza Strip to a new humanitarian zone that will be arranged for long-term stay, will be enclosed, and anyone entering it will first be checked to ensure they are not a terrorist. The IDF will not allow a rogue population to refuse evacuation this time. Anyone remaining outside the humanitarian zone will be implicated. This plan has American backing.”

The very same day, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz released a video statement hinting at something similar. “Residents of Gaza, this is your final warning,” he said. “The Air Force’s attack on Hamas terrorists was just the first step. The next phase will be far harsher, and you will pay the full price. Soon, the evacuation of the population from combat zones will resume.

“If all Israeli hostages are not released and Hamas is not removed from Gaza, Israel will act with unprecedented force,” Katz continued. “Take the advice of the U.S. president: return the hostages and remove Hamas, and other options will open for you — including relocation to other countries for those who wish. The alternative is complete destruction and devastation.”

The parallels between the two statements are clearly no coincidence. Even if Magal did not learn about Israel’s new war plan directly from Katz or the army’s new chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, it is reasonable to assume he heard it from some other senior military sources.

In yet another piece of foreshadowing, journalist Yoav Zitun of Israeli news site Ynet drew attention to remarks made by Brig. Gen. Erez Wiener after his recent dismissal from the army for mishandling classified documents. “It saddens me that after a year and a half of ‘pushing the cart uphill,’ just when it finally seems like we’ve reached the final stretch and the fighting will take the right turn (which should have happened a year ago), I won’t be at the helm,” Wiener wrote on Facebook.

As Zitun noted, Wiener is no ordinary officer. Before his firing, he played a pivotal role in planning the army’s operations in Gaza, where he consistently pushed to impose full Israeli military rule over the territory. If Wiener, who was reportedly implicated in leaks to far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich, says that “the fighting will take the right turn,” one can infer what kind of turn he means. This also aligns with the apparent desires of Chief of Staff Zamir, as well as details of an attack plan that were allegedly leaked to the Wall Street Journal earlier last month.

Connecting all these dots leads to a fairly clear conclusion: Israel is preparing to forcibly displace the entire population of Gaza — through a combination of evacuation orders and intense bombardment — into an enclosed and possibly fenced-off area. Anyone caught outside its boundaries would be killed, and buildings throughout the rest of the enclave would likely be razed to the ground.

Without mincing words, this “humanitarian zone,” as Magal so kindly put it, in which the army intends to corral Gaza’s 2 million residents, can be summed up in just two words: concentration camp. This is not hyperbole; it is simply the most precise definition to help us better understand what we are facing.

An all-or-nothing principle

Perversely, the plan to establish a concentration camp inside Gaza may reflect Israeli leaders’ realization that the much-touted “voluntary departure” of the population is not realistic in the current circumstances — both because too few Gazans would be willing to leave, even under continued bombardment, and because no country would accept such a massive influx of Palestinian refugees.

According to Dr. Dotan Halevy, a researcher of Gaza and co-editor of the book “Gaza: Place and Image in the Israeli Space,” the concept of “voluntary departure” is based on an all-or-nothing principle. “Consider this hypothetical,” Halevy told me recently. “Ask Ofer Winter [the military general who, at the time of our conversation, looked set to be tasked with heading the Defense Ministry’s “Voluntary Departure Directorate”] whether evacuating 30 percent, 40 percent, or even 50 percent of Gaza’s residents would be considered a success. Would Israel really care if Gaza had 1.5 million Palestinians rather than 2.2 million? Would that enable the annexation fantasies of Bezalel Smotrich and his allies? The answer is almost certainly no.”

Halevy’s book features an essay by Dr. Omri Shafer Raviv exposing Israel’s plans to “encourage” Palestinian emigration from Gaza after the 1967 War. The title, “I Would Like to Hope That They Leave,” borrows a quote from then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Published in January 2023 — a full two years before President Donald Trump would announce his “Gaza Riviera” plan — it reflects how deeply the notion of transferring Gaza’s population has been ingrained in Israeli strategic thinking.

The article reveals Israel’s two-pronged approach to reduce the number of Palestinians in Gaza: first, encouraging them to move to the West Bank, and from there to Jordan; and second, seeking countries in South America willing to absorb Palestinian refugees. While the first strategy saw some success, the second failed completely.

According to Shafer Raviv, the plan ended up backfiring on Israel. Though tens of thousands of Palestinians left Gaza for Jordan after Israel deliberately lowered living standards in the enclave, most of them remained. But crucially, the deteriorating conditions gave rise to unrest — and, as a result, armed resistance.

Realizing this, Israel decided by early 1969 to ease the economic situation in the Strip by allowing Gazans to work in Israel, thus relieving the pressure to emigrate. Additionally, Jordan began to close its borders, further slowing Palestinian flight from the Strip. Ironically, some of the Gazans who moved to Jordan as part of Israel’s displacement plan later participated in the Battle of Karameh in March 1968 — the first direct military confrontation between Israel and the nascent Palestinian Liberation Organization which further cooled Israel’s enthusiasm for encouraging emigration from Gaza.

Ultimately, Israel’s security establishment reached the conclusion that it was preferable to contain Palestinians in Gaza, where they could be monitored and controlled, rather than to disperse them across the region. According to Halevy, this perception has guided Israeli policy vis-à-vis Gaza until October 2023, and explains why Israel did not seek to force residents out of the Strip during its 17-year blockade. Indeed, until the start of the war, leaving Gaza was an extremely difficult and costly process, available only to Palestinians with wealth and connections who could reach foreign embassies in Jerusalem or Cairo to obtain visas.

Today, Israeli thinking regarding Gaza has seemingly flipped: from external control and containment to full control, expulsion, and annexation.

In Shafer Raviv’s essay, he recounts a 2005 interview with Maj. Gen. Shlomo Gazit, the architect of Israel’s post-1967 occupation policy and the first head of the army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT). When asked about the original Gaza expulsion plan, which he himself helped formulate 40 years earlier, his response was: “Anyone who talks about this should be hanged.” Twenty years later, with the current right-wing government, the prevailing sentiment is that anyone who doesn’t talk about “voluntary departure” of Gaza’s residents should be hanged.

And yet, despite the dramatic shift in strategy, Israel remains firmly trapped by its own policies. For “voluntary departure” to be sufficiently successful to enable annexation and re-establishment of Jewish settlements in the Strip, one would think that at least 70 percent of Gaza’s residents would have to be removed — meaning more than 1.5 million people. This goal is utterly unrealistic given the current political circumstances, both within Gaza and across the Arab world.

What’s more, as Halevy points out, even discussing such a proposal could reopen the question of freedom of movement in and out of Gaza. After all, if the departure is “voluntary,” Israel would in theory be required to guarantee that those who leave can also return. In an article on the Israeli news site Mako last week, describing a pilot program where 100 Gazans are set to leave the enclave for construction work in Indonesia, it was explicitly stated that “according to international law, anyone who leaves Gaza for work must be allowed to return.”

Whether or not Smotrich, Katz, and Zamir have read Halevy and Shafer Raviv’s articles, they likely understand that “voluntary departure” is not an immediately executable plan. But if they truly believe that the solution to the “Gaza problem” — or to the Palestinian issue as a whole — is for there to be no Palestinians left in Gaza, then it will certainly not be possible all in one go.

In other words, the idea appears to be: first, corral the population into one or more closed-off enclaves; then, let starvation, desperation, and hopelessness do the rest. Those locked inside will see that Gaza has been completely destroyed, that their homes have been leveled, and that they have neither a present nor a future in the Strip. At that point, the Israeli thinking goes, Palestinians themselves will begin pushing for emigration, forcing Arab countries to take them in.

Obstacles to expulsion

It remains to be seen whether the military — or even the government — is willing to go all the way on such a plan. It would almost certainly lead to the deaths of all the hostages, carrying the potential for major political fallout. Moreover, it would be fiercely resisted by Hamas, which has not lost its military capabilities and could inflict heavy losses on the army, as it did in northern Gaza right up until the final days before the ceasefire.

Other obstacles to such a plan include the exhaustion of Israeli army reservists, with growing concerns about both “silent” and public refusal to serve; the civil unrest being generated by the government’s aggressive efforts to weaken the judiciary will only intensify this phenomenon. It is also firmly opposed (at least for now) by both Egypt and Jordan, whose governments could go as far as suspending or canceling their peace agreements with Israel. Finally, there’s the unpredictable nature of Donald Trump, who one day threatens to “open the gates of hell” on Hamas and the next sends envoys to negotiate with the group directly, calling them “pretty nice guys.”

At present, the Israeli army is continuing to pummel Gaza with airstrikes and seize more territory around the Strip’s perimeter. Israel’s declared goal in its renewed assault is to pressure Hamas into extending phase one of the deal, meaning the release of hostages without committing to ending the war. Hamas, aware of Israel’s strategic limitations, refuses to budge from its position: any hostage deal must be tied to ending the war. Meanwhile, Zamir, who is perhaps genuinely fearful that he won’t have an army left to conquer Gaza, has remained conspicuously quiet, avoiding substantive statements about the military’s intentions.

Still, the combined pressure for a deal — from the population of Gaza, which is demanding for this nightmare to end and turning against Hamas, and from Israeli society, which is exhausted from the war and wants the hostages back — may not lead to a new ceasefire. On Monday, the Israeli army ordered all residents of Rafah to relocate to the so-called “humanitarian zone” in Al-Mawasi; in the Israeli media, this was presented as part of the pressure campaign on Hamas to agree to release the remaining hostages, but it could very well be the first step toward establishing a concentration camp.

Perhaps the government and the military believe that a “voluntary departure” of Gaza’s population will erase Israel’s crimes — that once Palestinians find a better future elsewhere, past actions will be forgotten. The sad truth is that while forced transfer of this scale is not practically feasible, the methods Israel might use to implement it could lead to even graver crimes — concentration camps, systematic destruction of the entire enclave, and possibly even outright extermination.

A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.

Among them is Ahmed Abu Amsha, a music teacher who has become something of a humanitarian troubadour.

Fleeting moments of joy

Living in a worn tent with his family, he refuses to let despair drown out hope. Instead, he teaches music to displaced children, helping them find moments of joy through rhythm and song.

Originally from Beit Hanoun, Abu Amsha is a guitar instructor and regional coordinator at the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. Since the war began, his family has been displaced 12 times. Each time they fled, they took their instruments.

“They’re the only thing that keeps us hopeful,” he said, sitting beside bottles of water outside his tent, a guitar resting gently in his lap.

UN Video | Music amid the rubble: A Gazan musician plants seeds of hope

Daily horror

Daily life in the camp is a grind of hardship – narrow alleys, water queues, a constant struggle to survive. Yet within this bleakness, Abu Amsha has created something extraordinary: Gaza Bird Singing (GBS), a musical group made up of displaced children with budding talents.

The idea came during a period of displacement in Al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, where he began training children to sing and play. The group has since performed in various camps, their music echoing on social media and offering a rare glimpse of hope amid rubble.

Clinging to music

His son Moein, who plays the ney – an end-blown wind instrument similar to a flute – carries his instrument wherever they go. “We’ve been displaced more than 11 times, and I always carry my ney with me. It’s the only thing that helps me forget the sound of the bombing,” he said.

Finding a quiet space is hard, but they try to practise inside their tent, cocooned from chaos.

For Yara, a young violinist learning under Abu Amsha’s guidance, each new displacement deepens her anxiety. “But whenever I’m scared, I play. Music makes me feel safe,” she said.

Under the tarpaulin roofs of the camp, children gather to play, plucking strings, blowing wind instruments, tapping rhythms into existence – trying to transcend the horrific soundtrack of war.

UN News Ahmed Abu Amsha (right, with guitar) surrounded by children who play, sing and learn music.

Sacred space

In a place stripped of necessities, the sound of music feels both surreal and sacred.

Yet Abu Amsha remains steadfast in his mission. “We sing for peace, we sing for life, we sing for Gaza,” he says softly, as the melody of the oud rises behind him – a fragile beauty in a scene shattered by war.

It is often said that Israel’s war on Gaza is the first live-streamed genocide. Hind Rajab’s tragic final pleas and breaths were broadcast across the internet for all to hear. Israeli soldiers proudly post videos of their atrocities and destruction on TikTok. Brave Palestinians have built massive social media followings, as viewers log on every day to witness their hunger, displacement, and terror. More people around the world have been exposed to near real-time, graphic images of killings and starvation than ever in history.

What is not unique about the genocide in Gaza is that world leaders — the only people with the means to stop it — have known about Israel’s actions, and its intentions, since day one. And they have done close to nothing to stop it.

The pleas of starving people, images of emaciated bodies, the dehumanization on which such cruelty and suffering is built remind me of the writings, images, and experiences of Jews whom the Nazis imprisoned and starved in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. My mother was one of those people, a small child at the time, thrown into ever-increasingly crowded spaces with less and less food by the week.

Starving at Bergen-Belsen alongside my mother, perhaps in the same barracks, was Hanna Levy-Hass, mother of Haaretz journalist Amira Hass. Hanna was one of the few people to keep a diary throughout her time at Bergen-Belsen, which survived and was later published.

In February 1945, she wrote: “Hunger crushes the spirit. I feel my physical and intellectual strength diminishing. Things escape me, I can’t think properly, can’t grasp events, can’t realize the full horror of the situation.

“Our hunger has only become fiercer,” the diary entry went on. “Our bodies have been demolished by it, we all drag ourselves around like rags; men literally drop to the ground from exhaustion and end up dying of hunger, simple as that.”

Eighty years later, in a dispatch this week from Khan Younis in southern Gaza, +972 Magazine journalist Ruwaida Amer wrote, “For about a month now, though, I’ve lost the ability to follow the news. My focus is slipping. My body is breaking down.”

“We rarely leave the house anymore, afraid our legs might give out,” Amer continued. “It already happened to my sister: while searching on the streets for something, anything, to feed her children, she suddenly collapsed to the ground. Her body didn’t even have the strength to stay upright.”

One of the questions that has always haunted me about the Holocaust is what ordinary people could have done to stop the mass murder and deportations from taking place. There were, of course, plenty of individuals who saved countless Jews by hiding or smuggling them at great risk to themselves and their families. Less known are the very small number of general strikes and mass protests. In early 1941, for instance, an estimated 300,000 people shut down the city of Amsterdam in an attempt to stop the Nazi deportation and killing machine.

According to the U.S. National WWII Museum, “Tram drivers and sanitation crews started it. Dockworkers quickly joined in. Workers on bicycles rang the doorbells at homes and halted traffic in the streets, imploring drivers to join them. Factories closed. Offices, shops, and restaurants stood empty.” The Nazi response was fierce, deadly, and effective: German forces killed nine strike participants in street clashes, injuring dozens more, and later executed 18 protesters that tried to organize another action.

No similar mass mobilization ever took place again, and the Nazis killed more than three-quarters of Dutch Jewry in the years that followed. If mass popular action was insufficient, however, foreign military intervention could have saved countless lives, if not stopped the genocide altogether. Indeed, by 1944, Jewish leaders were lobbying officials in the U.S. government to bomb Auschwitz and the railways transporting Jews to it.

In 2013, in a speech intended to rally international support for military action against Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued, “The Allied leaders knew about the Holocaust as it was happening. They understood perfectly what was taking place in the death camps. They were asked to act, they could have acted, and they did not.”

At another Holocaust ceremony four years later, Netanyahu was even more specific: “If the world powers had acted in 1942 against the death camps — and all it would have required was repeated bombing of the camps — they could have saved four million Jews and the lives of many millions more. The Allies knew — and did not act.”

Last September, at a conference held by the New York-based magazine Jewish Currents, the question of how to stop this genocide was inescapable. In one session, an audience member challenged a senior South African diplomat, Zane Dangor, asking why, “instead of sending our best lawyers to the Hague, why don’t we send our best generals to Gaza?”

Dangor’s answer, that military support would only likely make things far worse, was soberly rooted in the vast power imbalance between Israel, which has the seemingly unconditional backing of the world’s greatest superpower, and those few nations with the courage to confront it.

A few weeks ago, I ran into Dangor at an emergency meeting of The Hague Group in Bogotá, where representatives of 30 countries had gathered to discuss what concrete steps they could take to end the genocide in Gaza. In his opening remarks, Dangor reminded the participating states that they “have the ultimate responsibility to ensure and protect the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.”

The United States threatened all of the participants, saying it would “aggressively defend our interests, our military, and our allies, including Israel, from such coordinated legal and diplomatic warfare.” But 12 of the 30, none with the influence or strength to challenge a superpower, stood up to U.S. pressure and announced an arms embargo against Israel along with other trade measures and steps to prosecute Israeli war criminals.

There is, of course, an entire spectrum of potential interventions that lie between “bombing the tracks,” an arms embargo, and complete inaction. Hundreds of global and Palestinian human rights and civil society organizations recently called on countries around the world to join a humanitarian convoy, “dispatching official diplomatic missions — at the highest possible level — to accompany the aid trucks already waiting at the Rafah Crossing, and to enter Gaza alongside them.”

The time for concrete action is now, and all options should be on the table.

The US State Department told Congress on Friday that it plans to sell nearly $3 billion in weapons to Israel, including thousands of bombs and $295 million worth of armored bulldozers that had been held up by the previous administration over human rights concerns that US President Donald Trump has largely eschewed.

The prospective weapons sales were notified to US Congress on an emergency basis, meaning they will not be subject to review by the House and Senate’s foreign relations committees. Trump’s predecessor, US President Joe Biden, also utilized the measure to approve arms sales to Israel during the war in Gaza.

In a statement, the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio “has determined and provided detailed justification that an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale to the Government of Israel of the above defense articles and defense services in the national security interests of the United States, thereby waiving the Congressional review requirements.”

The proposed arms sale “will improve Israel’s capability to meet current and future threats, strengthen its homeland defense, and serve as a deterrent to regional threats,” the DSCA said.

According to the State Department, three separate sales were sent to US Congress for approval.

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One is for $2.04 billion for 35,529 MK 84 or BLU-117 heavy bombs and 4,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads.

While the Pentagon said that deliveries would begin in 2026, it also said “there is a possibility that a portion of this procurement will come from US stock” which could mean immediate delivery for some of the weapons.

The second sale is for $675.7 million for 201 MK 83 1,000-pound bombs, 4,799 BLU-110A/B 1,000-pound bombs, and 5,000 JDAM guidance kits. Deliveries are expected in 2028.

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The third sale, estimated at $295 million, includes D9 Caterpillar bulldozers and related equipment. The deliveries of the bulldozers, which the Israeli military uses, are expected to begin in 2027.

In November, it was reported that the Biden administration was holding up the sale of the D9 bulldozers due to the IDF’s use of them to raze homes in Gaza. The IDF has said the homes were used by Hamas and accuses the terror group of using civilians as human shields.

Trump, who took office six weeks ago, has also walked back other Biden measures meant to curb arms sales to Israel.

Earlier this week, US officials said Trump — who has made massive cuts to foreign aid — rescinded National Security Memorandum 20, which required recipients of US foreign aid to commit in writing that they will not use them to target civilians or restrict humanitarian aid. Biden had signed the order last year amid lobbying by progressives in his Democratic party.

Trump also scrapped Biden’s order blocking a shipment to Israel of 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs, such as those included in the US State Department’s arms sale notification on Friday. The shipment of 1,800 bombs arrived in Israel last month.

Biden had blocked the shipment in May, as Israel, over his opposition, launched an operation in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah.

Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians had sought shelter there amid the war, sparked on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages.