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Israel is ploughing ahead with a plan to build what critics have described as a “concentration camp” for Palestinians on the ruins of Rafah in southern Gaza, in the face of a growing backlash at home and abroad.

The suggestion, first mooted by Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz earlier this month, anticipates an area that could accommodate an initial group of some 600,000 already displaced Palestinians in Gaza, which would then be expanded to accommodate all of the enclave’s pre-war population of some 2.2 million people. It would be run by international forces and have no Hamas presence.

Once inside Katz’s self-styled “humanitarian city”, Palestinians would not be allowed to leave to other areas in Gaza, but would instead be encouraged to “voluntarily emigrate” to other unspecified countries, the minister said.

Katz’s plan has already received significant criticism. Labelled a “concentration camp” by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and illegal by Israeli lawyers, it has even been criticised by the military that will be responsible for implementing it, with the military’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, reportedly calling it “unworkable” with “more holes in it than cheese”.

Internationally, a British minister said he was “appalled” by the plan, while Austria and Germany’s foreign ministers expressed their “concern”. The United Nations said it was “firmly against” the idea.

But members of the Israeli government have defended the idea, and leaks continue to emerge in the Israeli media over the debate surrounding it within the government – with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly asking only for a plan that was speedier and less costly than a plan presented by the Israeli army.

An Al Jazeera investigation has found that Israel has recently increased the number of demolitions it is conducting in Rafah, possibly paving the way for the “humanitarian city”.

Long planned

Depopulating Gaza has long been an ambition of some of Israel’s more hardline settler groups, who believe themselves to have a divine mandate to occupy the Palestinian territory. The Israeli far-right was encouraged to press ahead with the idea when United States President Donald Trump suggested in February that Palestinians in Gaza could be displaced and moved elsewhere.

Since then, both Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have backed calls for displacement.

When Netanyahu announced in May the creation of the controversial US-backed GHF, a body intended to deliver limited aid into the enclave his forces had been besieging since early March, Netanyahu referred to a future “sterile zone” that Gaza’s population would be moved into, where they would be allowed aid and food.

Later the same month, Smotrich, who has criticised the current plan as too costly but is not opposed to the idea in principle, also suggested that plans were under way to push Gaza’s population into a camp.

Addressing a “settlement conference” in the occupied West Bank, Smotrich told his audience that what remained of Gaza would be “totally destroyed” and its population pressed into a “humanitarian zone” close to the Egyptian border, foreshadowing the language used by Katz.

Part of the Israeli plan

Israeli political analyst Nimrod Flashenberg told Al Jazeera that – for the Israeli government – there was merit to the plan, both from a security perspective, and “from the perspective of ethnically cleansing” Gaza, and providing an end goal that Israel’s leaders could define as a success.

“As I understand it, parts of the military regard removing civilians from the [non-Israeli controlled parts] of Gaza and concentrating them in a single space as an ideal first step in locating and eliminating Hamas,” Flashenberg said of the Palestinian group that Israel has failed to eliminate in 21 months of conflict, despite the killing of more than 58,000 people.

Flashenberg added that the plan would effectively create an “ethnic cleansing terminal”, from which, once people were separated from their original homes, “it makes it easier to move them elsewhere”.

“Of course it complicates ceasefire negotiations, but so what?” Flashenberg said, referring to the ongoing talks aimed at bringing about an initial 60-day ceasefire. “Nothing has really changed. It’s possible, of course, that with work on the concentration camp under way, Hamas might still accept the ceasefire and hope that things might change.”

“It’s part of their entire mentality,” Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the Israeli parliament representing the Hadash-Ta’al party, said. “They really do believe that they can do anything: that they can move all of these people around as if they’re not even humans. Even if imprisoning just the first 600,000 people suggested by Katz is inconceivable. How can you do that without it leading to some kind of massacre?”

“That they’re even talking about criminal acts without every state in the world condemning them is dangerous,” she added.

But lawyers in Israel have questioned the legality of the move. Military lawyers are reported to have “raised concerns” that Israel might face accusations of forced displacement, and an open letter from a number of Israeli legal scholars is more explicit, slamming the proposal as “manifestly illegal”.

‘Nothing humanitarian’

According to the United Nations, at least 1.9 million people, about 90 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population, have been displaced as a result of Israeli attacks. Many have been displaced multiple times.

Earlier this month, Amnesty concluded that, despite the militarised delivery of limited aid into the strip, Israel is continuing to use starvation as a weapon of war. According to the rights agency, the malnutrition and starvation of children and families across Gaza remain widespread, with the healthcare system that might typically care for them pushed to breaking point by Israel.

“Humanitarian city? I despise all these euphemisms. There’s nothing humanitarian about this. It’s utterly inhumane,” Yossi Mekelberg, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, said. “There would be nothing humanitarian about the conditions that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would be pushed into or about the idea you can only leave by going to another country.”

“This has to be condemned and there has to be consequences,” he continued.  “It’s not true when people say there’s no international community any more. If you trade with Israel, cooperate militarily or diplomatically with it, you have leverage. The US has leverage, the EU [European Union] has leverage. All these actors do.”

Israel has carried out powerful air strikes near Syria’s presidential palace and on the military headquarters in the heart of Damascus, a major escalation in its bombardment of the neighbouring country.

At least three people were killed and 34 others were wounded in the attacks on Damascus on Wednesday, Syrian state media reported, citing the Ministry of Health.

While targeting Damascus, the Israeli military continued to pound areas in southern Syria, including Suwayda, where a new ceasefire deal has been struck after four days of clashes between Druze armed groups, Bedouin tribes and government forces, which left hundreds dead.

Syria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the Israeli attacks on Damascus and Suwayda were “part of a systematic Israeli policy to ignite tension and chaos and undermine security in Syria”, calling on the international community to take “urgent action” against Israeli aggression.

Israel said its bombing campaign is aimed at protecting the Druze minority, and it has called on the Syrian government to withdraw its troops from the city of Suwayda, where much of the violence has taken place.

Defence Minister Israel Katz said on X that the Israeli military would “continue to operate vigorously in Suwayda to destroy the forces that attacked the Druze until they withdraw completely”.

Later on Wednesday, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the parties to the fighting in southern Syria had agreed on “specific steps that will bring this troubling and horrifying situation to an end tonight”.

“This will require all parties to deliver on the commitments they have made and this is what we fully expect them to do,” Rubio said on X of the ceasefire deal, reached one day after an earlier iteration had collapsed.

More than 300 people had been killed in fighting as of Wednesday morning, including four children, eight women and 165 soldiers and security forces, according to the UK-based war monitor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Army withdrawal from Suwayda

The Syrian Ministry of Interior and Druze leader Sheikh Yousef Jarbou confirmed on Wednesday that they had reached a ceasefire. But the new deal was rejected by Sheikh Hikmat al-Hajari, another Druze leader, who promised to continue fighting until Suwayda was “entirely liberated”.

According to the ministry, the deal declares a “total and immediate halt to all military operations”, as well as the formation of a committee comprising government officials and Druze spiritual leaders to supervise its implementation.

That evening, the Syrian Ministry of Defence said it had begun withdrawing the army from Suwayda “in implementation of the terms of the adopted agreement after the end of the sweep of the city for outlaw groups”.

Speaking shortly before Rubio’s announcement of a deal, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce had said that the US wanted Syrian government forces to “withdraw their military in order to enable all sides to de-escalate and find a path forward”.

But while Syrian troops are withdrawing, the government will be maintaining a presence in the city,

Reporting from Syria’s capital Damascus, Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr said the deal included the “deployment of government forces”.

“They will set up checkpoints, and this area will be fully integrated into the Syrian state,” she said.

A complete withdrawal by the government would, she said, “mean a failure in efforts by the new authorities to unite a fractured nation and extend its authority across Syria”.

“But staying could open a much bigger conflict with Israel that has promised more strikes if, in the words of Katz, the message wasn’t received.”

Pretext to bomb

The escalation in Syria began with tit-for-tat kidnappings and attacks between Druze armed factions and local Sunni Bedouin tribes in the southern province of Suwayda.

Government forces that intervened to restore order clashed with the Druze, with reports of the former carrying out human rights abuses, according to local monitors and analysts.

The actions committed by members of the security forces – acknowledged as “unlawful criminal acts” by the Syrian presidency – have given Israel a pretext to bombard Syria as it builds military bases in the demilitarised buffer zone with Syria seized by its forces.

Haid Haid, consulting fellow at London-based think tank Chatham House, told Al Jazeera that Israel had been clear since the ouster of Bashar al-Assad last year that they did not want Syrian forces “to be deployed to the deconfliction line in southern Syria”.

“One way Israel is trying to advance that plan is to present itself as the ‘protectors’ of the Druze community,” Haid said.

Ammar Kahf, the Damascus-based executive director of the Omran Center for Strategic Studies, said: “It’s a clear message to the Syrian government that the Israelis are not going to be silent.

Food intended to feed 27,000 starving children in Afghanistan and Pakistan will soon be incinerated in the wake of President Donald Trump’s closure of the United States’ aid agency.

A senior US official on Wednesday said nearly 500 tonnes of high-energy biscuits, to be used as emergency food for malnourished young children, expired this month while sitting in a warehouse in Dubai.

Under questioning by lawmakers, Michael Rigas, the deputy secretary of state in charge of management, tied the decision to the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which closed its doors on July 1.

“I think that this was just a casualty of the shutdown of USAID,” Rigas said, adding that he was “distressed” that the food went to waste.

Aid officials managed to save 622 tonnes of the energy-dense biscuits in June – sending them to Syria, Bangladesh and Myanmar – but 496 tonnes, worth $793,000 before they expired this month, will be destroyed, according to two internal USAID memos reviewed by Reuters, dated May 5 and May 19, and four sources familiar with the matter.

The wasted biscuits will be sent to landfills or incinerated in the United Arab Emirates, two sources said. That will cost the US government an additional $100,000, according to the May 5 memo verified by three sources familiar with the matter.

Trump has said the US pays disproportionately for foreign aid, and he wants other countries to shoulder more of the burden. His administration announced plans to shut down USAID in January, leaving more than 60,000 tonnes of food aid stuck in stores around the world, Reuters reported in May.

The food aid stuck in Dubai was fortified wheat biscuits, which are calorie-rich and typically deployed in crisis conditions where people lack cooking facilities, “providing immediate nutrition for a child or adult”, according to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat, said lawmakers had specifically raised the issue of the food with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in March. In May, he promised lawmakers that no food aid would be wasted.

“A government that is put on notice – here are resources that will save 27,000 starving kids, can you please distribute them or give them to someone who can?

“Who decides, no, we would rather keep the warehouse locked, let the food expire, and then burn it?”

Rigas said that the US remained the world’s largest donor, and he promised to learn further details about the biscuits.

“I do want to find out what happened here and get to the ground truth,” he said.

The US is the world’s largest humanitarian aid donor, amounting to at least 38 percent of all contributions recorded by the UN. It disbursed $61bn in foreign assistance last year, just over half of it via USAID, according to government data.

The Trump administration notified Congress in March that USAID would fire almost all of its staff in two rounds on July 1 and September 2, as it prepared to shut down. In a statement on July 1 marking the transfer of USAID to the State Department, Rubio said the US was abandoning what he called a charity-based model and would focus on empowering countries to grow sustainably.

Already, miners have successfully protested a proposal by the Trump administration to close more than 30 field offices run by the Mining Safety and Health Administration, a branch of the Labor Department that enforces safety standards.

Another government bureau, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), faced staffing cuts of nearly 90 percent under Trump. Miners pushed back, arguing that NIOSH’s research is necessary for their protection.

“For generations, the United Mine Workers of America has fought to protect the health and safety of coal miners and all working people,” union president Cecil Roberts said in a statement announcing a lawsuit against the cuts in May.

“The dismantling of NIOSH and the elimination of its critical programs — like black lung screenings — puts miners’ lives at risk and turns back decades of progress.”

Some of NIOSH’s workers were reinstated. Others were not. The upheaval left some investigations in states like Wyoming in limbo.

Marshal Cummings, a United Steelworkers union representative in southwest Wyoming, was among those seeking NIOSH’s help. He had grown concerned about the potential for trona miners like himself to be exposed to high levels of silica dust, a known carcinogen.

“We know what silica does to people,” Cummings told Al Jazeera. “We know that it causes people to get their lungs cut up by jagged edges of a silica particle, and then they slowly die. They lose that same quality of life that people who work on the surface have.”

Cummings believes there is too little research to fully understand the toll silica exposure is taking on trona miners.

Already, trona miners work in extreme conditions. Their mines cut deep into the earth. One of Wyoming’s biggest trona pits plunges to a depth of 1,600 feet or 488 metres: deep enough to swallow three full-sized copies of the Great Pyramid of Giza, stacked on top of each other.

Cummings was also dismayed to learn that a new rule slated to take effect in April had been pushed back until at least mid-August.

The rule would have lowered the acceptable levels of silica dust in mines. Heavy exposure has been tied to respiratory diseases. Black lung — a potentially fatal condition caused by dust scarring the lungs — has been on the rise in Wyoming, as it is throughout the US.

To Cummings, blame rests squarely on the shoulders of mining executives whom he sees as more interested in their wallets than their employees’ health. He believes the silica rule’s delay is part of their political manoeuvring.

“The pause is not just the pause,” Cummings said. “It’s giving people who care more about a favourable quarterly report than they do their employees an opportunity to get this rule completely thrown out. And that’s unacceptable.”

Travis Deti, the executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association, represents some of the industry leaders who opposed the new rule. They felt the silica rule was “a little bit of overreach”, he explained.

“I know that a lot of our folks have a little heartburn over it, that it might go a little too far,” Deti said.

He pointed out that coal mining, for instance, is different in Wyoming than it is in the Appalachia region. While Appalachian miners have to tunnel to harvest the fossil fuel, Wyoming has surface mines that require less digging.