On May 12 the IPC, the global authority on food security, issued a dire warning. “The Gaza Strip is still confronted with a critical risk of famine,” it wrote. “Goods indispensable for people’s survival are either depleted or expected to run out in the coming weeks. The entire population is facing high levels of acute food insecurity.” One in five people in Gaza, the group reported, now faces starvation. 

Over the past nineteen months of war, the Israeli military has destroyed the civilian infrastructure—agricultural fields, water installations, medical facilities, power lines—needed to sustain life in Gaza. The devastation has intensified the preexisting crisis created by Israel’s nearly two-decade closure of the coastal enclave, which blocked access to educational opportunities, separated families, and short-circuited economic activity. Now the Israeli military’s campaign has left Gaza’s two million-plus residents, nearly half of whom are children, unable to grow crops, process food, or pump clean water. Already dependent on humanitarian aid, they have become still more so—even as Israeli authorities have allowed life-saving supplies into the Strip at only a fraction of the volume the population requires.

During the last cease-fire, which went into effect on January 19, those authorities let in significantly more humanitarian and commercial goods. But on March 2, as the cease-fire deal faltered, the government blocked all supplies from entering. The ensuing shutdown has been unprecedented: at no point since Israel built a fence around Gaza and created designated “crossings” in the 1990s has the government closed off the territory to all goods for this long. The results have been devastating. Even Donald Trump acknowledged last week that people in Gaza are “starving,” although he also said that Hamas had diverted aid and was therefore to blame. (The UN rejects this charge.)

As pressure mounted to open the crossings, even from within the Israeli military, the government responded by giving civilians in Gaza a stark choice: leave your home or risk starvation. On May 5 Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan to bypass humanitarian aid mechanisms used by the United Nations and experienced international humanitarian organizations. Such groups employ hundreds of distribution points to meet people where they are, minimizing displacement and the dangers of traveling through active combat areas and ensuring that aid remains accessible to people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups. Instead the government says it will create centralized distribution centers in policed areas, mostly in southern Gaza, to which the Israeli military has sought to move people. On Wednesday the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a new, US-backed group led by an American military veteran and social entrepreneur, said that it had received approval from Israel to begin distributing aid this month in parts of the Strip patrolled by the Israeli military. 

The UN and veteran aid groups have rejected the Israeli plan, calling it a dangerous “pressure tactic” that would result in “driving civilians into militarized zones.” Requiring people to leave their places of shelter in order to get food would exacerbate the forced displacement that has been a hallmark of Israeli military operations in Gaza, affecting 90 percent of its residents. Since the start of the war, the Israeli government has obstructed aid missions in the areas that it has ordered civilians to leave; the new proposal would allow it to prevent aid distribution altogether in parts of Gaza it wants to clear of Palestinians.

The plan to make Palestinians in Gaza accept further displacement as a condition of receiving food parcels is intertwined with another: to press them into leaving Palestine altogether. The Israeli far right has promoted the ethnic cleansing of the Strip for decades, and the war may present a chance to make that proposal a reality. In November 2023 government ministers announced a “Gaza Nakba,” calling for the Strip to be handed over to Jewish settlers; the following month Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly pledged to find countries “to absorb” Palestinians from the enclave. 

The threat of exile has grown more real in recent months. In March, a month after Donald Trump announced his ambitions to turn Gaza into a resort and permanently relocate its Palestinian residents, the Israeli government took concrete action to make that happen by creating a “Voluntary Emigration Bureau” that would facilitate one-way travel out of the Strip. Concern is growing that Israeli authorities could use the new, militarized aid distribution zones as transit camps to third countries. Satellite imagery from the last few weeks shows a twenty-acre razed area near the Strip’s southern tip, where the Israeli military said it will create one such zone. It’s not far from Kerem Shalom (also known as Karem Abu Salam), the southern crossing between Gaza and Israel, which Israeli officials have used as a transit point for Palestinians leaving for foreign countries. 

Displacement and refusal of return are familiar experiences for Gaza’s residents, more than two thirds of whom are refugees from cities, towns, and villages in what is now Israel, from which they or their parents and grandparents fled or were expelled in 1948. The Israeli authorities’ refusal to allow them to return home—or even to move to other parts of Israel–Palestine, including the West Bank—is part of a broader policy of maintaining Israeli Jewish dominance over Palestinians, including demographic superiority.

In 1949 the fledgling state of Israel achieved that demographic superiority by preventing the return of some 700,000 Palestinian refugees, ensuring a Jewish majority in what became Israel’s internationally recognized borders. But the 1967 capture of Gaza and the West Bank created a new demographic challenge. Here, too, the Israeli government embarked on an ambitious initiative to maximize the amount of land it controlled while minimizing the number of Palestinians living there. 

In 1967 Israel established governmental committees charged with “encouraging” Palestinians to permanently leave Gaza through a combination of push and pull: keeping unemployment high while providing shuttles, stipends, and food rations to those willing to depart.1 Later, as Israeli settlement ambitions shifted to the West Bank, the government used inducement, coercion, and force to push Palestinians from the West Bank into Gaza and experimented with plans to relinquish control over the Strip, rendering it an “open-air prison” for a population they hoped to contain. Occasionally authorities would grant people permission to exit Gaza or the West Bank on the condition that they relinquish their right to return, or would revoke their residency status once they traveled abroad—or when they simply failed to attend a military census. The modalities shifted, but the aim of such policies remained consistent: to limit the number of Palestinians in Israeli-controlled territory.

By the eve of the current war, nearly six decades of occupying Gaza and the West Bank had expanded Israel’s borders, as a matter of fact if not of law. Despite having withdrawn Jewish settlements from Gaza in 2005, Israel’s authorities control all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, home to about seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians. Israeli government officials say all that land belongs to the Jewish people, but demographic data suggest that if Jews aren’t already a minority there, they soon will be—that is, unless the Israeli government can reduce the number of Palestinians living in Gaza by attacking populated areas, destroying the conditions needed to sustain life, and encouraging or forcing displacement.

Israel launched its full-scale attack on Gaza after Hamas-led fighters crossed from the Strip into southern Israel and killed hundreds of civilians, in acts that amounted to crimes against humanity. In the ensuing war the Israeli military has committed its own serious international crimes against civilians in Gaza, including collective punishment, forced displacement, and extermination. Among Israel’s crimes is its weaponization of aid, which it has used as leverage to achieve its stated aims of toppling Hamas and returning the hostages taken that day. During cease-fire deals in which hostages were released, aid flow increased, but as each deal collapsed Israeli authorities slowed the flow to a trickle. The Israeli government has obstructed the work of international organizations and outlawed UNRWA, the main relief organization serving Palestinian refugees. 

Conditions in Gaza have grown increasingly desperate, but the vast majority of people remain unable to flee. Israel has kept its own crossings from Gaza closed. Egypt’s authoritarian government—citing its opposition to forced displacement but also worried that an influx of Palestinian refugees would undermine its hold on power—barred entry for all but an estimated 100,000 Palestinians, including a small number of medical patients and those who bought their way into the country by paying thousands of dollars to brokers believed to have ties to the Egyptian state. Even that limited means of escape evaporated when the Israeli military took over the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt in May 2024, largely closing off passage. 

The cease-fire earlier this year opened up the possibility of return and reconstruction within Gaza. As part of the deal, the Israeli military allowed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to return from the south to the north, many of whom found their homes destroyed. The Israeli government meanwhile eased restrictions on aid entering the Strip, including limited housing materials. 

But Trump’s announcement of his mass displacement plan fueled Israeli momentum to exile Palestinians. Government ministers joined messianic right-wing groups at conferences and festivals to drum up support for settling Gaza with Jewish Israelis. Last month Israel’s interior minister traveled to the Israeli city of Eilat for a photo op with a plane full of Palestinians who, he claimed, were voluntarily emigrating from Gaza to Germany; he later boasted that, as of early April, departing Palestinians had already filled sixteen aircraft. Netanyahu said on May 13 that most Gaza residents would choose to leave once he found countries willing to admit them—even though under international law Israel itself is obligated to admit Palestinian refugees from Gaza. Israel’s official endorsement of plans to ethnically cleanse the Strip has become so brazen that this month a former Israeli defense minister, originally from Netanyahu’s own right-wing Likud party, publicly accused the government of ordering soldiers to commit war crimes.

Pushed to the edge, many people in Gaza are looking for a way out. The Strip’s universities are destroyed. Medical patients can’t access care. Families are exhausted. Facebook posts and rumors about ways to leave abound. 

There are unconfirmed signs that Israel may be preparing to let Palestinians do just that—but with conditions attached. Last month I contacted an Israeli lawyer in response to a social media post offering to represent Gaza residents in Israeli emigration proceedings. (Social media has been flooded with telephone numbers supposedly belonging to Israeli intelligence agents and attorneys offering to help Palestinians leave Gaza.) For 2,500 NIS ($700), this lawyer told me, he could help Palestinians who hold foreign visas exit the Strip in vehicles hired by the Israeli military and fly to their destination country on planes chartered by the Israeli government. He claimed that the government would give them 50,000 NIS ($14,000) if they signed a document promising “never to set foot in Gaza” again. Six thousand people, he said, had already hired him to represent them before the new “Voluntary Migration Bureau,” to “expedite” their exit.

He admitted, however, that none had left Gaza yet. And despite Israeli officials’ promise of mass departure, the government is still blocking Palestinians from leaving the Strip. Students lucky enough to be accepted to foreign universities are trapped, only a third of patients requesting medical evacuation have been allowed to travel since October 2023, and even foreign nationals wait months or longer for permission to cross. Only a few hundred Palestinians have managed to leave Gaza since the collapse of the latest cease-fire on March 18, including a small number of medical evacuees and foreign nationals and visa holders. Meanwhile the activities of the migration bureau remain opaque, contributing to a general sense of disorientation. 

Given the choice, many people will seek asylum elsewhere. International law requires Israel to let them do so. But they also have a right to come back. Well-founded skepticism of the Israeli government’s intention to allow return hangs heavy over individual decisions to stay or go, even as conditions worsen. “After more than nineteen months of forced starvation, dehydration, and displacement, we do not know how much longer we can hold on,” a Palestinian aid worker in Gaza recently told the BBC. Israel’s and the US’s joint endorsement of exile for Palestinians also casts a shadow over the willingness of foreign countries to accept people from Gaza, should Israeli authorities allow them to leave. 

Polls show that most Americans oppose Trump’s plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza. That opposition should extend into rethinking the US’s longstanding support for denying Palestinians their right to return to homes in what is now Israel. US policymakers have normalized that denial, to the point that Trump has been looking to Egypt or Jordan—and reportedly now, according to NBC News, Libya—to absorb Palestinians rather than demand that Israeli authorities respect their right to live in Israel. But as a campaign devoted to resettling refugees from Gaza in Israel correctly points out, “return is walkable, immediately available, cost effective, and just.” It will happen when enough people grasp the connection between its denial and the horrors that people in Gaza are facing now—and take action accordingly.