Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has publicly confirmed that his country has finalized operational plans to enact a controversial proposal first put forward by former US President Donald Trump that would displace the vast majority of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Katz has emerged as one of the most vocal proponents of the plan, which was first unveiled in February 2025: the proposal would require roughly 2 million Palestinians to leave Gaza permanently and resettle in third countries with no right of return, after which Israel would clear the remains of the enclave, which has suffered widespread destruction from more than two years of sustained Israeli military operations that have already displaced most of Gaza’s existing population.
Trump and his Israeli backers have framed the initiative as “voluntary migration,” but the plan has drawn fierce international condemnation. United Nations officials, multiple foreign governments, and leading global human rights organizations have universally condemned the initiative as a deliberate plot to carry out illegal ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people of Gaza.
Shortly after Trump first announced the proposal, Katz stated he had ordered the Israel Defense Forces to begin developing infrastructure and procedures to facilitate the mass departure of Gaza’s Palestinian population. Notably, the policy of forced displacement was ultimately dropped from the 20-point “peace plan” that Trump formally agreed to in October 2025. However, in an exclusive interview Wednesday with Israeli news outlet Ynet and leading daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, Katz made clear that planning for the relocation has remained on track, and that Israel stands ready to launch the operation immediately once Trump gives the official go-ahead.
“ There is no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration,” Katz told reporters. He claimed that 80 percent of Palestinians residing in Gaza want to leave the territory permanently, a figure he asserted is consistently backed by public opinion surveys. Katz did not provide specific details about the origin or methodology of the purported surveys, but a May 2026 poll conducted by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli body that manages civilian affairs in occupied Palestinian territories, only found that nearly 80 percent of respondents wanted more information about potential relocation pathways through the Rafah or Kerem Shalom border crossings. The survey question never established that respondents sought permanent departure from Gaza.
Independent surveys conducted by neutral pollsters paint a far different picture: most studies find that between half and a majority of Gaza residents intend to remain in their home territory, even amid the widespread destruction and crippling deprivation that has followed more than two years of conflict.
Katz went on to state that the Israeli government is “fully prepared to move [Palestinians] out if it becomes possible—by sea, by air, by every way possible.” He added that the only factor delaying implementation is a lack of formal US backing for third countries that would agree to accept displaced Palestinians. “Every country that is willing wants American backing. Currently, President Trump didn’t cancel this; he froze it. All the Arab countries came to him due to their pressure on this matter,” Katz said.
Katz suggested that a breakdown in the existing ceasefire and disarmament agreement with Hamas would create the conditions to move forward with the plan. He argued that “the moment will come” when it becomes clear that Hamas has failed to meet its commitments under the Phase 2 disarmament and withdrawal roadmap that the group agreed to in July 2026, which built on the initial October 2025 ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel.
Israel has claimed that the agreement requires Hamas to fully disarm before Israel withdraws any troops that advanced past the original October 2025 ceasefire line in violation of the truce. However, the formal text of the roadmap explicitly states that Israeli withdrawal and Hamas disarmament will proceed in parallel.
Katz claimed that once the agreement is declared breached, Israel “will get a green light to move forward militarily, territorially, and in other areas, and this thing will gain momentum.”
While other senior figures in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government have openly stated their goal of forcing Palestinians out of Gaza to make way for new Jewish Israeli settlements, Katz’s Wednesday remarks represent one of the most concrete confirmations to date that a fully developed plan to carry out the mass displacement is already in place.
H.A. Hellyer, senior associate fellow at the UK-based Royal United Services Institute, responded to Katz’s comments by saying that “This is the Israeli defense minister admitting, completely and brazenly, that the official policy of the Israeli state is ethnic cleansing in Gaza. But somehow we are expected to take seriously those who say it is not.”