Israel's Katz calls for confining all Gazans in 'humanitarian city'

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00:00He's forging peace as we speak, one country and one region after the other.

00:05Those are the words of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

00:07as he presented the US President Donald Trump with a letter that he says he sent,

00:12nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

00:15Donald Trump replying that he thinks things are going to be really settled down a lot in the Middle East.

00:20The highlights then as the two men met for dinner in the White House.

00:23Netanyahu saying he's working on plans to give Palestinians a better future

00:27and even suggesting that the residents of Gaza should be allowed to move to differing nations.

00:34I think President Trump had a brilliant vision.

00:38It's called free choice.

00:40You know, if people want to stay, they can stay.

00:43But if they want to leave, they should be able to leave.

00:46It shouldn't be a prison.

00:47It should be an open place and give people a free choice.

00:51We're working with the United States very closely about finding countries

00:57that will seek to realise what they always say,

01:00that they want to give the Palestinians a better future.

01:04And we've had great cooperation from surrounding,

01:07meaning surrounding Israel, surrounding countries,

01:09great cooperation from every single one of them.

01:12So something good will happen.

01:14Well, International Affairs commentator Doug Herbert is joining me here on set.

01:18Doug, we're going to talk about that dinner in just a moment.

01:20But perhaps events in Israel even more significant.

01:24Israel's defence minister laying out plans for the forced transfer of Gazans

01:28to what he called a secured city built on the ruins of Gaza.

01:32Already legal experts describing it as a blueprint for a crime against humanity, Doug.

01:38So yes, Stuart, if I were to stand here and say to you that these plans are essentially plans

01:44to build a concentration camp in occupied territory in the southern tip of Gaza,

01:51you might be a little shocked.

01:53You might roll your eyes.

01:55Some of our reviewers might say,

01:56come on, that's a bunch of hyperbole.

01:58What's he talking about?

01:59Not my words.

02:00The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, has explicitly used the word concentration

02:05saying that these plans call for concentrating hundreds of thousands,

02:11if not potentially millions, of Gazans in Rafah.

02:15Remember, Rafah is right abutting Egypt there at the very southern tip of Gaza.

02:19It's been all but razed in this war.

02:22Now, you see an arrow up there on the screen.

02:24What this is, is it's summing up plans by the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz,

02:30who has basically ordered, instructed the Israeli defence forces to bring forward a plan

02:36to transfer in a first phase up to 600,000 Palestinians.

02:42And here's the arrow part, right?

02:44Al-Mawasi is a coastal area.

02:46You can see it right there on the Mediterranean

02:48in which hundreds of thousands already displaced Palestinians

02:52have been crammed in, evacuated there from other areas.

02:56They would, under this plan, be coming in an initial phase from Al-Mawasi,

03:00transferred to Rafah.

03:03Now, here's where there are a split screen of what the Israelis,

03:07how they build this plan and what legal experts,

03:10what international rights groups looking at the details of this plan,

03:14as so far proposed, are saying.

03:16The Israelis say this is merely a plan to get all the Gazans in one place.

03:21They're calling it a humanitarian zone.

03:24Israel's defence minister calls it, quote, a humanitarian city.

03:27The caveat being it's built on the ruins of a raised city of Rafah.

03:31The other caveat being is it's a small city, cramming in 600,000 Gazans,

03:36let alone ultimately the entire population of Gaza, over 2 million people.

03:41That would be, to put it mildly, extremely cramped conditions there.

03:46What the legal experts say is it looks like, and it's not a far-fetched to speculate this

03:54because the Israeli right-wing government of Netanyahu has explicitly talked about this type of vision.

04:01It looks like the prelude to a mass deportation, if you will, of the Palestinians

04:07concentrated in this zone, in Rafah, out of Gaza, out of the Gaza Strip,

04:13to other neighbouring countries willing to take them.

04:17We talked at the meeting, Donald Trump, Netanyahu, and Trump talked about a brighter future.

04:22You quoted Netanyahu saying that for Palestinians.

04:25That's how he sees it.

04:26The Israelis are not billing this as a forcible transfer, a forcible deportation.

04:30You said at the top that would be under international treaties seen as a crime, a war crime,

04:35a crime against humanity, forcibly uprooting an entire population from their homeland

04:39and shipping them out of their country.

04:42What he sees this as is basically something that would offer them a better future, a brighter future.

04:48But at the end of the day, this is a plan that looks like and seems like, when you look at its details,

04:55something that is going to very much be something that raises a lot of hackles with Palestinians

05:01who are going to be wondering what's going on here.

05:03We're perfectly fine where we already live in other parts of Gaza.

05:08This looks like the prelude to a plan to evacuate all of Gaza,

05:11create an Israeli-controlled, militarily-controlled site in that strip,

05:15and then get the Palestinians out.

05:17So perhaps you could ultimately build Donald Trump's vision of a Riviera of the Mideast in Gaza.

05:22Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, isn't it, Doug, the way that the more interesting story seemed to happen in Israel,

05:27whereas we were left at the dinner with very little to say, really.

05:31There wasn't much substance.

05:32I mean, any closer to a ceasefire in Gaza?

05:35Look, closer to a ceasefire could happen, right?

05:38Donald Trump clearly has made it clear that he sees, he thinks they're close to a deal.

05:44He thinks Hamas is perhaps ready to negotiate.

05:47He's been ramping up the pressure on Netanyahu.

05:49Donald Trump says he wants an end to the war.

05:51The question is, Netanyahu says he wants the war to end.

05:53He wants the hostages to end.

05:55But Netanyahu puts very strict conditions on that.

05:57He says that the changes to the proposed plan, the U.S. brokered plan,

06:01that Hamas has proposed changes to are just not acceptable to Israel.

06:06So the problem is, yeah, you can end up with a ceasefire agreement.

06:09We could be standing here in a few days, a week's time, two weeks' time saying, ceasefire deal.

06:14The problem is a lasting piece, a lasting ceasefire.

06:17We saw what happened during the prior, the last one earlier this year, 42-day ceasefire, which collapsed.

06:23It was supposed to be in three phases.

06:25It collapsed before it even got past the first phase.

06:29Why?

06:29Because there are strict differences, demarcations between Netanyahu's insistence on vanquishing Hamas.

06:37That is an insistence from his far-right members of his coalition who do not want an end to this war

06:42until Hamas is out of there, decimated, no longer exists.

06:46And the Hamas' insistence that any ceasefire must include guarantees for a lasting ceasefire,

06:53an end to the war, and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops.

06:57The Israelis have committed themselves under the proposed plan to withdrawing from parts of Gaza,

07:03some parts of Gaza, not all of them, very differing visions of the plan.

07:08Netanyahu could accept a deal, but it won't be the deal that the Palestinians or Hamas specifically sees as what they agree to.

07:16And Doug, just time to ask you, I know you wanted to talk about the West Bank as well,

07:19home to some 700,000 Jewish settlers.

07:22And the government of Netanyahu, you say, continuing its policy of land grabs there very much.

07:28Two distinct things happening here.

07:30Absolutely.

07:30As you know, Israel occupied Gaza after the Six-Day War in 1967.

07:36It has maintained that zone as an occupied zone.

07:39It is since then every government has had settlements there,

07:41and there has been a recent surge in the expansion of those settlements.

07:45Last month, well, two months ago actually now, in May,

07:47the Israeli government approved 22 new settlements, that is Jewish settlements,

07:52Jewish settlers putting up posts and living among the Palestinian population in West Bank,

07:58and also authorized new outposts.

08:01These outposts, these illegal, are considered illegal under international law.

08:05They're not recognized by the international community.

08:08Those settlements are expanding.

08:09On Monday, we had more of what the Palestinians see as a land grab,

08:13Israelis called state lands, a land grab in northeastern Ramallah,

08:17which is the administrative capital of Gaza,

08:20which they are going to attach the Israelis to one of these Jewish settlements.

08:25And finally, you have the demolition policy, which is separate.

08:28That is a policy of raising homes in a lot of the Palestinian refugee camps,

08:32Tulkarem, Janine, Norshams.

08:34The Israelis say, in order to create a more controlled security zone to prevent terrorist breeding grounds from springing up there,

08:43the Palestinians say, no.

08:44It's basically making it expelling people, displacing people from their homes,

08:48and making the prospect of a Palestinian, viable Palestinian state, even less likely.

08:53So the combination of that, the home demolitions, and plus the settlement expansion and explicit policy of Netanyahu's government

09:02do make that two-state solution or a viable state seem far off as ever.

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