Opinion & Analysis
Ben Gvir's emigration plan reads as a coalition demand, not a policy
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Itamar Ben Gvir's "Disengagement 710" sets out to remove 1.86 million people from Gaza in seven years. Read as a plan, its numbers do not survive contact with the countries it names. Read as the price list Otzma Yehudit will present to the next coalition, they make complete sense. That is the reading this analysis follows.
The document the national security minister unveiled on Thursday, reported by the Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Post, proposes 250,000 departures in the first year, 1.11 million within three and 1.86 million within seven, from a population of about 2.3 million.
It asks for an initial 10 billion shekels of Israeli money and up to 50 billion in matching funds, and it names Turkey, Ethiopia, Congo and unnamed Arab states as destinations.
The arithmetic#
None of those countries has agreed to take anyone. Egypt refused the idea outright when Donald Trump floated it in February 2025, and the White House dropped it by October in favour of encouraging Palestinians to rebuild in place. Turkey, which Israel now treats as an adversary, is on the list as a destination for people Ben Gvir wants gone.
The first-year figure alone would require moving some 685 people a day, every day, through crossings whose daily throughput Israel itself controls and has kept to a fraction of that for most of the past year.
What the plan is for#
The tell is in the ministry. Ben Gvir said an Emigration Ministry would be Otzma Yehudit's first demand for joining the next government. The plan's name fuses the 2005 withdrawal with 7 October, and its slogan, "instead of digging tunnels, it's time to pack suitcases," was written for a rally, not a cabinet.
Israel Katz supplied the government's side a day earlier. The defence minister said emigration plans remain "under discussion" and are merely "frozen" by Washington, and told a Ynet conference that, in his account, 80 per cent of Gazans want to leave. Neither minister said whether the Defence Ministry directorate set up in 2025 to organise departures has moved anyone.
So the plan sits inside a live government position rather than outside it. What Ben Gvir added on Thursday is a number, a timetable and a portfolio, seven weeks before an election in which Likud has just released a lawmaker, Tally Gotliv, to run on his list.
For Palestinians the distinction between plan and demand is thin. Forcible transfer of a protected population is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute whichever ministry administers it, and the UN secretary-general has warned that pushing Palestinians out of Gaza could amount to ethnic cleansing.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry has described Ben Gvir's earlier statements on Gaza as "systematic incitement" and asked governments for "concrete measures" against him.
The plan will not move 1.86 million people. It may well move a ministry into a coalition agreement, and that is the outcome to watch.
