As Israel plans to remove the rubble of Rafah, international intervention, specialised teams urgently needed to recover victims’ bodies by Euromed Human Rights Monitor

The circulating plans to reshape the area under the name of the “Green City” in Rafah will be used to entrench the isolation of the population and forcibly concentrate them into military-controlled ghettos, thereby perpetuating their displacement from their original homes and imposing deadly living conditions that undermine the basic foundations of their survival.

Over recent days, Euro-Med Monitor’s team has documented the evacuation by the Israeli occupation army, alongside contractors operating under its authority, of the entire area under full Israeli control in Rafah, and the commencement of rubble removal and land levelling. The army confirmed in recent hours that no less than 70 per cent of rubble removal operations in the city have been completed.

Bulldozing and land levelling operations in Rafah are being carried out despite confirmed indications that hundreds of bodies remain beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings and in streets and agricultural fields, posing a serious risk of damaging human remains and erasing their locations before recovery and identification can take place.

The so-called “Green City” constitutes a complementary mechanism to the ongoing path of genocide, as it transforms widespread destruction and population displacement into a permanent reality by erasing Rafah, preventing residents from returning to their homes, lands, and livelihoods, and then forcing them into a security-managed isolation zone governed by gates, permits, and surveillance under military control. This enables the imposition of foreseeable and systematic restrictions on food, water, medicine, fuel, healthcare services, movement, and work, and perpetuates forced dependence on aid controlled by the occupying power. As such, the proposed “city” is not a humanitarian plan but a living environment that produces gradual destruction, accelerates health and social collapse, and exacerbates hunger, disease, and death, amounting to the deliberate imposition of life-threatening conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group, in whole or in part.