International human rights groups are sounding the alarm over Israel’s proposed “Humanitarian City” in southern Gaza, warning that the plan masks a new chapter of forced displacement and demographic engineering.

Amnesty International has called the proposal outrageous, stating that relocating Gaza’s population under the guise of humanitarian care is not a solution but a violation of international law. Countries that support such measures, it warned, risk complicity in the ongoing crimes committed against Palestinians.

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor was more direct: the plan, it said, is not humanitarian, it is genocidal. What Israel envisions is the confinement of over half a million Palestinians in a fenced, heavily controlled area built on the ruins of Rafah. Movement will be restricted, exits forbidden, and life reduced to survival under military watch.

Far from easing suffering, the proposed “Humanitarian City” would institutionalise it. The Monitor warns that this is not a step toward peace or recovery but a transitional phase in a broader scheme to empty Gaza of its people. Israeli officials have already hinted at supporting what they call “voluntary migration”, a term human rights groups say whitewashes policies of expulsion.

This latest move signals a dangerous evolution of Israel’s assault on Gaza, from mass killing and starvation to mass internment. Rebranding detention zones as “safe areas” is not new, but in Gaza, it’s a cruel inversion of reality: displaced families are to be herded into camps on top of the rubble where they once lived, all under the watchful eye of the very army that destroyed their homes.

There is nothing voluntary about migration under siege, and there is nothing humanitarian about caging a population stripped of freedom, safety, and dignity. This is not a city. It is a prison, and the world must not look away.