A planned “humanitarian city” inside Gaza intended to hold hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would be a “concentration camp,” former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has warned.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said last week he had told the military to advance plans for the zone, which would eventually contain the entire population of Gaza. The area would be built on the ruins of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, and once Palestinians enter the zone, they would not be allowed to leave. Katz also vowed to implement a plan for the emigration of Palestinians from Gaza.
“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” Olmert told The Guardian newspaper on Sunday. “If they (Palestinians) will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing.”
In response to Olmert’s comments, the Prime Minister’s Office called him a “convicted felon disgracing Israel on CNN.” In a statement, the office said: “We evacuate civilians. Hamas blocks them. He calls that a war crime?” Olmert was freed from prison in 2017 after serving 16 months on corruption charges.
Olmert has previously blasted the conduct of the Israeli military in Gaza and the country’s political leadership. In May, he said he could no longer defend Israel against accusations of war crimes. “What is it if not a war crime?” he asked rhetorically in an interview with CNN. He said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and far-right members of his government are “committing actions which can’t be interpreted any other way.”
More than 58,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The latest comments from Olmert, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2006-2009, go much further in criticizing the country’s intentions in Gaza, however, especially since comparisons to Nazi concentration camps in Israel is considered virtually unthinkable. But Olmert said it was the “inevitable interpretation” of the plans.
“When they build a camp where they (plan to) ‘clean’ more than half of Gaza, then the inevitable understanding of the strategy of this (is that) it is not to save (Palestinians). It is to deport them, to push them and to throw them away,” Olmert told the Guardian.
Katz’s plans for what he dubbed the “humanitarian city” were discussed at a meeting with Netanyahu on Sunday evening, according to a source familiar with the matter. But after Israeli news outlets reported that it would take months to build the zone and billions of dollars, the source said Netanyahu asked to make its establishment shorter and less expensive.
Yair Lapid, the head of Israel’s opposition, blasted the plans as an attempt by Netanyahu to let his far-right government partners “run wild with extreme fantasies just to preserve his coalition.” In a statement on social media, Lapid called to “end the war and bring back the hostages.”
Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer, told CNN last week that Katz’s plan amounts to the forcible transfer of a population in preparation for deportation. Both of these are war crimes, Sfard said.
“If they are done on a massive scale – whole communities – they can amount to crimes against humanity,” Sfard added, dismissing the notion that any departure from Gaza could be considered voluntary.
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