Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published on Sunday that the Israeli government’s plan to build a so-called “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah amounts to a concentration camp, warning that if the plan is carried out, it could be considered ethnic cleansing.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz first announced last week that the government wants to concentrate the entire civilian population of Gaza into a camp in Rafah. Katz said that once Palestinians are inside the camp, they cannot leave.
“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” Olmert told The Guardian. “If they [Palestinians] will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing. It hasn’t yet happened.”
Olmert, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said that ethnic cleansing would be the “inevitable interpretation” if the plan is carried out.
“When they build a camp where they [plan to] ‘clean’ more than half of Gaza, then the inevitable understanding of the strategy [is that] it is not to save [Palestinians]. It is to deport them, to push them and to throw them away. There is no other understanding that I have, at least,” Olmert said.
The former Israeli prime minister claimed Israel is not currently carrying out ethnic cleansing, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have made clear that is the goal of Israel’s current military operations.
According to the Israeli news site Ynet, Israeli officials estimate that the construction of the “humanitarian city” will cost between $2.7 billion and $4 billion and that Israel may have to take on the cost by itself. The initial proposal involved building essentially a sprawling tent camp that could house 500,000 people.
Katz said that the initial plan will be to move 600,000 civilians from the al-Mawasi area of southern Gaza into the concentration camp with the ultimate goal of forcing all of Gaza’s civilians into the area.
In his interview with The Guardian, Olmert also criticized Israel’s actions and settler attacks in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. “[It is] unforgivable. Unacceptable. There are continuous operations organized, orchestrated in the most brutal, criminal manner by a large group,” he said.
Many of the attacks in the West Bank are carried out by a group known as the “hilltop youth,” which Olmert said should be named the “hilltop atrocities.” He said that the settler attacks couldn’t be happening without support from the government. “There is no way that they can operate in such a consistent, massive and widespread manner without a framework of support and protection which is provided by the [Israeli] authorities in the [occupied Palestinian] territories,” he said.
Olmert added that Israel’s behavior was losing its support in the US, a phenomenon he said could not be explained away with allegations of antisemitism. “We make a discount to ourselves saying: ‘They are antisemites.’ I don’t think that they are only antisemites, I think many of them are anti-Israel because of what they watch on television, what they watch on social networks,” he said. “This is a painful but normal reaction of people who say: ‘Hey, you guys have crossed every possible line.”
While Olmert has been increasingly critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank, he oversaw major military operations when he was prime minister, including the 2006 Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead, a heavy bombing campaign in Gaza that lasted over three weeks at the end of 2008 into 2009 and killed about 14,000 Palestinians.
