It is tapping into a well-known colonial strategy of isolating and fragmenting an occupied population.
[…]
If plans for these “safe communities” proceed, they would cement a deadly fragmentation of Gaza. The purpose of creating these camps is not to provide humanitarian relief but to create zones of managed dispossession where Palestinians would be screened and vetted to enter in order to receive basic services, but would be explicitly barred from returning to the off-limits and blockaded “red zone”.
[…]
These plans represent a recycled version of what Israel has long wanted to do in Gaza. The creation of “bubbles” – an initial, telling euphemism that I first heard proposed by the Israeli authorities when I was part of coordinating humanitarian operations in Palestine as a United Nations official – was the first iteration of areas where Palestinians would be screened and would be conditioned to receive controlled assistance.

The model of contained communities is not entirely new. The British created “new villages” in Malaya in the 1950s, the Americans created “strategic hamlets” in Vietnam in the 1960s, and the colonial authorities in Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe) created “protected villages” in the 1970s during so-called “counter-insurgency”.

Civilian populations were coerced and forced into camps where they were screened in return for aid. The plan was to diminish popular support for resistance groups who were fighting colonial rule. It failed.

In South Africa, the apartheid government created bantustans, pseudo-independent homelands designed to concentrate and control the Black population. They also failed to prevent the collapse of a settler-colonial apartheid regime.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/11/22/how-the-us-israeli-peace-plan-will-partition-gaza