One year and one month after Israel's Defense Minister Israel Katz established a special emigration directorate in his ministry to allow Gaza Residents to leave the Strip, in accordance with a cabinet decision, it appears that nothing remains of his grand promises.
Officials familiar with the handling of requests to emigrate from Gaza speak of 100,000 men and women who have submitted applications, but say the State of Israel is the one preventing them from leaving. The official reason: No third country has been found with which to sign a migration agreement. But senior government officials and interested parties outside it say that the directorate, on the one hand, and the prime minister, on the other, are doing nothing to meet the ambitious plan they presented, and the results are accordingly poor.
"We are determined to realize the vision of US President Donald Trump, to allow the voluntary departure of Gaza residents who want it to various places around the world," Katz said in March 2025 when he established the directorate. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called it "the potential for historic change." As time passed and only a few hundred Gazans left the Strip for health reasons or with foreign passports, Minister Gila Gamliel said in a radio interview last July, "I suggest remaining optimistic that this will happen." Well, optimism did not help, and an Israel Hayom examination shows that the directorate has an office floor in Tel Aviv that is mostly empty, while weekly discussions held there for monitoring purposes were described by some invitees as "a waste of time."
According to a Defense Ministry statement from March 2025, "The directorate will work to prepare for and enable the safe and controlled passage of Gaza residents for their voluntary departure to third countries, including securing them as they move, establishing a movement and screening route for pedestrians at designated crossings in the Gaza Strip, and coordinating the provision of infrastructure that will enable passage by land, sea and air to the destination countries." In light of this target set for the directorate, defense officials say that getting the directorate's work moving depends on the prime minister, together with the Mossad, finding the destination for migration.
Officials familiar with the issue claim that more than 100,000 Gazans have already expressed willingness to leave, that there are countries that have expressed readiness to take them in small numbers, in the hundreds and thousands, and that even the Shin Bet security agency is already examining the names and approving them.
Trump's retreat
The data presented on requests to leave aligns with polling conducted in the Strip, in which more than 40% expressed a desire to emigrate from it. But it appears that international criticism is paralyzing implementation at the top levels of government, especially as the US president seems to have retreated from the migration vision he himself presented. In Trump's 21-point plan, published in September, it stated that "no one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. Gazans will be encouraged to stay and offered the opportunity to build a better Gaza." Even without the US, two government ministers say, Netanyahu was not planning to implement the migration plan anyway.
According to one of them, "There were indeed talks with countries to establish agreements with them for taking in Gazans. Some demanded absurd sums, but without American backing and with counterpressure from the Arab world, it was clear that the migration destination had been pushed aside and only the directorate remained." But another official downplays the use of Trump's support as an excuse for failure, saying, "The government had half a year to work with what Trump gave before he walked it back. They simply don't want to. Just as Netanyahu did not want to evacuate Khan al-Ahmar, just as he did not apply sovereignty in the Jordan Valley. After all, when he wanted to persuade Trump to strike Iran, he succeeded."
"Netanyahu simply does not believe in it enough," one minister says. "They needed to start creating initial agreements with several countries, get thousands out and see that it works. Success would also have led Trump to support migration again. Katz established the directorate under him, but the only one who can activate it is the prime minister." Incidentally, the person who identified the looming failure in advance was Ofer Winter, who was supposed to head the directorate. At a large conference with activists several months ago, he said, "They wanted to give me this role. I agreed to take it. But they understood that I meant it seriously. For real. So they fired me before I started."
The gap between the requests to leave Gaza and the Israeli side's willful blindness is causing growing discomfort. According to a military official familiar with the data, "Many Gaza residents want to leave because of the situation there after the war (as of this writing)."
400 a week
Today, up to 400 Gazans leave every week for a third country. They meet one of two criteria: having a visa or having medical problems. They leave via Kerem Shalom and from there to the Allenby crossing or Ramon Airport. Compared with the extensive work currently required to approve those seeking to leave Gaza, the directorate was supposed to create a mechanism for moving thousands out without requiring individual approval from the destination country for each person, which, as noted, did not happen.
Israeli officials claim that the retreat from implementing the plan in the directorate and government stems from fear of international sanctions. "They do not want, for all kinds of reasons, to be perceived as criminals in the international arena. There are always excuses," the official says, adding, "Migration is the only solution in Gaza. You help the population that wants to get out of there, and it is also the only thing that would have created deterrence throughout the region." He, too, repeats the claim I heard from more than one source that "there are no receiving countries" is "a lie." To extricate the plan from the mud, and there are those in the government who say it is still not too late, one minister proposes passing a government decision with metrics and targets that would also place the directorate under the prime minister's responsibility, appointing someone to head it as a liaison with the US, and restarting the process.
No response was received from the Prime Minister's Office or the defense minister's office.
