Israel Sells Gaza’s Future to South Sudan — But the Plot’s Unravelling

Right, so reports have emerged that Israel had been holding confidential discussions with South Sudan over the possible relocation of Palestinians from Gaza, yes they are still fixated on finding a third country to displace everyone to, as per the Trump plan for a Trump riviera to replace the Gaza Strip, you know his name will be shoehorned in there somewhere. Where this proposal has been consistently framed as “voluntary migration” and humanitarian relief, in reality, it is a move that international law defines as forcible transfer. Ethnic Cleansing.
The Associated Press has revealed that six individuals familiar with the talks had confirmed their existence, noting plans for a high-level Israeli delegation to travel to Juba. One source alleged a memorandum of understanding had already been signed by Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel. South Sudan has publicly denied the reports, but history shows such denials often mask ongoing negotiations. The very fact that such talks are occurring is a consequence of Israel’s broader strategy: facing mounting legal pressure and international censure over its war in Gaza, it is turning to vulnerable states that can be persuaded — or pressured — into taking on the burden of demographic engineering dressed up as humanitarian aid. But if South Sudan is their number one potential state for relocation, it merely underlines how little the care about the Palestinian people and what becomes of them next.
Right so he AP’s reporting was unusually detailed for such a sensitive subject. It noted that planning was underway for a high-level Israeli delegation to travel to Juba, and one source alleged that Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel, a potential candidate to become the next Israeli ambassador to the UK when we rid ourselves of Tzipi Hotovely, who’s 5 year stint is finally coming to an end, had already signed a memorandum of understanding with South Sudanese counterparts. The East African press reported that although the government of South Sudan had publicly rejected the idea, there was unease within its political circles about being linked to any plan that could be seen as facilitating ethnic cleansing. Other international outlets, including The Cradle, Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera, ran similar accounts, many pointing out that this was not an isolated initiative. Earlier in the year, other reports had come out that Israel had approached several other states — Somalia, Somaliland, Libya, Sudan, Indonesia, and Egypt — with variations on the same relocation proposal. In July, it was reported that an Israeli minister had unveiled a plan to confine Gaza’s population in a so-called humanitarian city built on the ruins of Rafah, a blueprint human rights groups denounced as a scheme for mass internment and displacement, it was a proposal for a concentration camp.
The South Sudan proposal was instantly denied by the country’s Foreign Ministry, which said that the reports were baseless and did not reflect government policy. On the face of it, such denials might seem decisive. Yet history shows that they are a standard feature of controversial “third country” deals, especially in their early stages. Rwanda and Uganda both issued similar denials during Israel’s 2013–2018 attempts to offload African asylum seekers there, even as negotiations continued behind the scenes. Albania publicly distanced itself from Italy’s offshore asylum processing plan until its government was ready to announce a deal. The pattern is one of strategic denial: avoid immediate political costs while keeping the option alive in private.
There are good reasons for South Sudan to tread carefully. To admit to participating in a plan to take in forcibly displaced Gazans would be to invite legal and diplomatic fire. Under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the forcible transfer or deportation of protected persons from occupied territory is prohibited “regardless of their motive.” There are only two exceptions — temporary evacuation for the security of civilians or imperative military reasons — and neither applies to moving civilians into another conflict-affected state with no prospect of return. Any government knowingly facilitating such a transfer risks being seen as complicit in a grave breach of the Convention, potentially amounting to a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. South Sudanese leaders could find themselves the subjects of arrest warrants if the ICC Prosecutor deemed that they had aided and abetted an internationally wrongful act. On the diplomatic front, such a move would almost certainly provoke condemnation from the African Union and the Arab League, alienating key partners like Sudan and Egypt, Egypt apparently having been warning South Sudan to refuse to take Palestinians. while inflaming public opinion across much of Africa and the Middle East.
If the denials are taken at face value, they represent a refusal to walk into that minefield. If they are, as precedent suggests they might be, a form of political insulation while talks proceed privately, then they speak to South Sudan’s acute awareness of the risks involved.
The question then arises: why would Israel target South Sudan in the first place? The answer lies in the country’s unique blend of vulnerabilities and needs. Economically, South Sudan is almost entirely dependent on oil exports, which must travel through pipelines in Sudan to reach international markets. This creates a structural dependence on an often-hostile neighbour, a neighbour that is currently the scene of the biggest humanitarian crisis on the planet right now, as the war between the state and the RSF militias rage on and leaves its revenue stream volatile as a result. The state budget suffers chronic shortfalls, and public sector wages are frequently delayed. Foreign aid remains an essential part of South Sudanese government financing. Politically, South Sudan is under targeted US and EU sanctions for corruption and human rights abuses, and its leadership is eager for a path back into the good graces of Western donors. Israel, with its considerable influence in Washington and Brussels, is in a position to facilitate such a rehabilitation.
Security is another lever. The South Sudanese military is factionalised and underfunded. Internal insurgencies and cross-border tensions make it dependent on foreign training, equipment, and intelligence support. Israel has a long history of providing such assistance to African governments, often with fewer conditions attached than Western militaries. Most moral army my foot once again. For a leadership concerned with regime stability, that is no small attraction. Diplomatically, as the world’s newest state — independent only since 2011 — South Sudan is still developing its foreign policy infrastructure. It has fewer entrenched alliances and less institutional resistance to transactional arrangements. Finally, the country exists in what might be called a low-media-density zone. While the humanitarian situation there is dire, South Sudan rarely commands sustained global media attention unless there is a major outbreak of violence. From Israel’s perspective, that relative obscurity could make it an ideal location to quietly implement a controversial resettlement scheme away from the scrutiny that a more high-profile host might attract.
The humanitarian reality on the ground in South Sudan, however, makes a mockery of the claim that such relocation would be protective. The World Food Programme and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification reported in mid-2025 that 7.7 million South Sudanese — around 57 per cent of the population — were facing severe food insecurity at IPC Phase 3 or worse, with tens of thousands in Phase 5, classified as famine or catastrophe. This is basically at the same level as Gaza has reached therefore. Conflict persists in multiple regions, and the United Nations has warned of the risk of a return to full-scale civil war. Healthcare infrastructure is threadbare outside of a few urban centres; refugee camps already hosting people fleeing Sudan and elsewhere are overcrowded, underfunded, and prone to disease outbreaks. To move displaced Palestinians into this environment would not meet the standard of a safe third country under international refugee law to say the very least. It would transfer them from one humanitarian emergency straight to another, compounding their displacement and insecurity rather than alleviating it. The only beneficiary is Israel and Trump who couldn’t care less.
The legal framework governing such situations leaves little room for manoeuvre. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention is clear and categorical in its prohibition on forcible transfers and deportations of protected persons from occupied territory. The International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, in Article 7(1)(d), defines deportation or forcible transfer as a crime against humanity when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population. The Elements of Crimes adopted by the ICC clarify that “forcibly” covers not only physical force but also threats, coercion, and the creation of a coercive environment. In other words, if civilians have no real choice but to leave — because of siege conditions, famine, or credible fear of violence — the transfer is considered forcible even if nominal consent is given, which you can imagine they could be pressured into doing. This interpretation has been reinforced in jurisprudence from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, notably in the Krstić case concerning Srebrenica, where the forced removal of women, children, and elderly persons was held to constitute forcible transfer despite the absence of overt violence in the act of removal.
The International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility add another layer of potential liability. Article 16 provides that a state which aids or assists another in committing an internationally wrongful act is internationally responsible if it does so with knowledge of the circumstances and if the act would be wrongful for it to commit itself. Applied here, that means South Sudan could be held internationally responsible if it knowingly facilitates the deportation of Gazans under coercive conditions, regardless of whether its own forces are directly involved in the transfer or not.
These legal obligations are clear. The International Court of Justice has already ordered Israel, in the ongoing genocide case brought by South Africa, to take all measures within its power to prevent acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention and to ensure that humanitarian conditions in Gaza are improved, not degraded, not that they are taking any notice, a reckoning must await them for that. The ICJ’s earlier Advisory Opinion on the Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory made clear that measures creating irreversible demographic changes in occupied territory are unlawful. A relocation of Gazans to South Sudan, especially one engineered under siege conditions, would move in the opposite direction from what the Court has demanded.
To fully understand the implications of the Israel–South Sudan reports, it is useful to place them in the context of similar arrangements attempted elsewhere. Israel’s own history offers a close parallel in its 2013–2018 “third country” deals with Rwanda and Uganda, under which Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers were to be flown out in exchange for cash and other inducements. Both Rwanda and Uganda denied the deals publicly, and in the end, Israel’s High Court blocked further removals amid legal challenges. Here in the UK, the plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for offshore processing was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court and then scrapped by the incoming Labour government after hundreds of millions of pounds had been spent. The European Union and Italy’s funding of the Libyan coastguard to intercept and return migrants to detention centres where abuse is endemic has drawn sustained condemnation from the United Nations and human rights groups. Australia’s payments to Cambodia to take refugees from its offshore detention centres yielded only a handful of relocations, most of which failed when the transferees moved on soon after arrival. The pattern in each case is consistent: the initiating state targets a partner that is aid-dependent or politically isolated, offers a package of incentives, frames the deal in humanitarian terms, and then faces legal and reputational blowback when the underlying coercion becomes clear.
Seen through this lens, South Sudan’s public denial looks less like categorical rejection and more like a holding position. The government knows the risks — legal, diplomatic, and domestic — of being perceived as complicit in the forced displacement of Palestinians. It also knows the potential gains: financial aid, security assistance, diplomatic cover, sanctions getting lifted and infrastructure projects. Strategic denial allows it to keep negotiating space open without committing itself in the court of public opinion.
Ethically and politically, the stakes could hardly be higher. Relocating Palestinians from Gaza to South Sudan would not protect them; it would entrench their displacement and undermine their internationally recognised right to return to their homes. It would normalise the use of population removal as a tool of conflict management, sending a dangerous signal that if a state can make life unliveable for a population, it can then export them to another country under the guise of humanitarianism. It would shift the burden of care to one of the world’s most fragile states, already struggling to meet the needs of its own people. Most fundamentally, it would provide political cover for Israel’s strategic aim of reshaping Gaza’s demographic reality in a way that makes the restoration of Palestinian sovereignty even harder.
The phrase “voluntary migration” cannot withstand serious scrutiny in this context. In a territory where the civilian population is under siege, facing bombardment and famine, the “choice” to leave is no choice at all. It is, in the words of international law, a coerced decision made in the absence of viable alternatives. That makes it forcible transfer, no matter how it is dressed up in diplomatic language.
The evidence, precedent, and law point to one conclusion: this is not about protecting civilians. It is about clearing territory, as if there is any doubt in our minds about that anyway, even if I hadn’t explained the why’s and wherefores. Relocating Gazans to South Sudan would deepen their displacement, undermine their right to return, and outsource their suffering to one of the most fragile states in the world.
Yet the full story is still not over. If the plan proceeds, it could lock in a permanent demographic change in Gaza and test the willingness of the international community to enforce its own laws. If it dies in denial, it will still stand as proof that forced displacement is no longer unthinkable in polite diplomatic company. What comes next — whether through quiet implementation or public collapse — could determine not just Gaza’s fate, but whether forced transfer becomes a normalised tool of twenty-first century conflict and it’ll be another nail in the coffin of the UN and those international legal frameworks aforementioned, which they supposedly defend.
Egypt’s warnings to South Sudan are however, pretty laughable given their own conduct, and the fact they’ve just signed a $35 billion gas deal with the genocidal blue and white state just proves what a bunch of hypocrites the Sisi regime is with regards to dealing with Israel. Get all the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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