Washington, DC, September 16, 2025 --  

Israel's evil plan to deport Gazans to the worst corners of the world is doomed to fail. The world should welcome it anyway.

As Israeli tanks and warplanes pummel the ancient but depopulated city of Gaza, two million refugees have scattered for safety. Those refugees can't go far. The entire Gaza Strip is but 450 square miles -- slightly smaller than the city limits of Omaha, Nebraska. This small area is penned off by the Mediterranean Sea on one side, and security fencing on Israeli and Egyptian borders on the others.

The rampant destruction of homes and high-rise apartment blocks by the Israeli Defense Forces makes the government policy abundantly clear: there will be no return to the pre-war status quo. There are two million angry Palestinians living on Israel's southern edge, a population that bred the violent and bloodthirsty Hamas Islamist movement that killed and kidnapped neighboring Israelis at the start of the war, are like a festering wound on Israel's southwestern edge. Nationalist Israelis believe the Gazans must be expelled.

Many Israeli's oppose this policy, and Arab states and liberal-minded Westerners decry the immorality of displacing millions of people from their homeland as an act of ethnic cleansing or genocide. But just because some find an act unacceptable or unthinkable doesn't mean it won't happen. As more and more of Gaza's infrastructure supporting two million residents turns to rubble and dust, the facts on the ground are increasingly making Gaza uninhabitable for such a large population.

But where will they all go?

Ah, there's the rub. For all the global sympathy for the victims of the war of Gaza, there is near zero support for hosting refugees from Gaza. Egyptian Arabs guard their short border with armed men and razor wire to keep the Gazans out. Nearby Jordan's monarchy has long feared its overthrow by the millions of Palestinian refugees already there. There is no chance they will accept millions more.

Other Arab states should be better candidates for Gazan resettlement. Many already host Arabic-speaking refugees from Syria's civil war. But accepting Palestinian refugees is politically suicidal -- it is seen by the Arab street as enabling Israeli ethnic cleansing. No Arab government will risk its people's wrath by helping Israel expel its Arab population.

Who's left? The world's poorest and most desperately vulnerable countries, that's who. Recall that the Trump administration convinced a few poor countries like South Sudan, Eswatini and El Salvador to accept immigration deportation flights in return for unspoken rewards.¹

Israel has reportedly negotiated sending refugees to war-torn South Sudan and Libya as well as the unrecognized state called Somaliland.^2,3 The latter region, an arid and desperately poor area that was once part of Somalia, would likely seek American and Israeli recognition of its breakaway country as part of the deal. South Sudan, also desperately poor, would undoubtedly demand significant secret rewards for their cooperation.

As horrible as things are in Gaza, it's hard to imagine Gazans voluntarily accepting an Israeli airlift to camps in such awful places. But there could be advantages, at least for some Gazans. Remember that most all Gazans have no freedom to travel outside the territory -- it is effectively an open-air prison guarded by Israel and Egypt. For Gazans who have a little money, or who have foreign-residing relatives with money, a plane to anywhere -- no matter how bad -- might be a brief stepping stone to a better life abroad.

A few staged photo ops of well-fed Gazan refugees in these camps might convince more Gazans to leave, especially if Israel continues to make life all but impossible in Gaza. And once the taboo of accepting Gaza refugees is broken, other (hopefully less desperate) countries might also allow Gazans out, too.

Clearly, all 2 million Gazans are not going to end up in Somaliland or South Sudan. Neither country has the resources to host so many refugees. And even if other countries begin to accept them, it would take years to transfer so many, even in the unlikely case that all were willing to go. Just do the math -- if Israel were to charter two A380 aircraft per day and send 500 Gazans out of the territory on each plane, it would still take five years to transfer the entire Gaza population of 2 million. Will Israel's right-wing government even be able to last that long? Such a plan is just not realistic.

That's actually a good thing. While the plan cannot hope to accomplish the evil goals of the Israeli government, it might actually be relief to at least a few Gazans who can use it as an escape hatch to get to better countries. Conditions in Gaza today are unimaginably miserable. While Israeli government policies creating such misery are evil, it is every bit as evil for the international community to seek to forever strand Gazans in this misery. Even an evil escape plan is better than no plan at all.

Notes:

1. BBC, US Deports Five 'Barbaric' Migrants to Eswatini, July 16, 2025

2. Al Jazeera, Somaliland Recognition for Forced Transfer of Palestinians? ‘Not Worth It’, September 8, 2025

3. Times of Israel, Israel Said in Talks With 5 Countries Over Taking Gazans, August 13, 2025