Israel's 'Green Rafah' Project and the Growing Push to Divide Gaza
Israel has approved infrastructure work in a designated area of eastern Rafah, near the buffer zone known as the Yellow Line, under a project called "Green Rafah" that experts warn could permanently split the Gaza Strip into isolated, separately administered zones. The project is backed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz. The Israeli Prime Minister's Office described it as a pilot supported by the United Arab Emirates aimed at building temporary housing free of Hamas's influence, according to Al Jazeera.
The Israeli military will oversee installation of water, sewage, and electrical infrastructure for the Green Rafah zone. Palestinian laborers selected for the work face intense security screenings by the Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence agency. Israeli authorities have banned the entry of mobile homes, or "caravans," into the Green Rafah area until at least November. That prohibition places the project in tension with the humanitarian protocol attached to a ceasefire agreement signed in Sharm el-Sheikh last year. That protocol explicitly mandates the entry of temporary housing and the repair of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, according to Palestinian researcher Mohammad Hamed al-Aila. Al-Aila notes that ten months have passed since the ceasefire deal was signed and Israel has not adhered to its humanitarian obligations, viewing the humanitarian situation in Gaza as a tool of political pressure.
On the same day Israel approved Green Rafah, Netanyahu publicly rejected the 15-point plan for Gaza announced by the United States-led Board of Peace. That plan calls for the staged disarmament of Hamas and the phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Strip. Netanyahu's position is that an Israeli pull-out will not happen until Hamas is fully disarmed, effectively setting disarmament as a precondition for any withdrawal and collapsing the sequential logic the Board of Peace's framework appears to depend on.
The Board of Peace had planned to launch a pilot Gaza housing project and believes it can establish a Rafah-area humanitarian zone regardless of whether Hamas agrees to disarm, but acknowledges it needs cooperation from other parties, according to The Times of Israel. Green Rafah appears to be that pilot, or at least a parallel Israeli initiative occupying the same conceptual space.
The broader context here stretches back months and reveals a consistent trajectory toward Gaza's de facto partition. In November 2025, The Guardian reported exclusively that the US military was planning for a divided Gaza with a "green zone" where reconstruction would proceed and a "red zone" where almost all Palestinians had been displaced and no reconstruction was planned. Around the same time, Reuters reported that a de facto partition between an Israeli-controlled area and a Hamas-ruled area was increasingly likely. By January 2026, the BBC reported that the Trump administration unveiled plans for a "New Gaza" featuring skyscrapers, with President Trump declaring, "We're going to be very successful in Gaza." France 24 reported Israeli plans to move Palestinian civilians to a new "humanitarian city" built on the ruins of Rafah. In February 2026, Reuters reported that the UAE had drafted plans to build a compound to house thousands of displaced Palestinians in a part of south Gaza under Israeli control. Reuters also reported that the second phase of Trump's Gaza plan envisions Hamas giving up its weapons and Gaza being demilitarized in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal.
Palestinian political researcher Ahmed al-Atawneh argues that projects such as Green Rafah are designed to create isolated zones — or "cantons," a term evoking the self-contained enclaves of past conflict partitions — under total Israeli administrative and security control. He says Israel's strategy relies on stripping the Palestinian struggle of its political dimension and criticizes Arab involvement in such frameworks outside a unified Palestinian consensus. His critique cuts to a central tension: the Emirati backing for Green Rafah positions a Gulf state as a partner in an Israeli-administered reconstruction process that bypasses any Palestinian political consensus, while simultaneously the US-led Board of Peace's broader 15-point plan demands Hamas disarmament as a prerequisite for Israeli withdrawal.
The architecture emerging from these overlapping plans carries several layers of contradiction. Netanyahu's rejection of the Board of Peace plan on the same day he approved Green Rafah suggests Israel is selectively engaging with elements of the international framework — namely those that involve infrastructure under Israeli security supervision — while discarding those that prescribe a timeline for withdrawal. The caravans ban through November further narrows what "temporary housing" means in practice: infrastructure may go into the ground, but actual shelter for displaced Palestinians remains contingent on Israeli approval that has been deferred. Whether the Board of Peace can sustain its humanitarian-zone concept without Israeli political buy-in for the full 15-point plan, or whether Green Rafah simply becomes the Israeli-controlled manifestation of a partitioned Gaza that the US military began planning for months earlier, will likely shape the next phase of post-war arrangements on the ground.
