Two eminent Israeli politicians criticized the government’s plans for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to set up what he calls a “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza, saying that the proposal would constitute Palestinians on an “concentration camp”.
The former prime ministers, Yair Lapid and Ehud Olmert, put criticism on Sunday while Israeli forces continued to bomb Gaza, killing at least 95 Palestinians during the day.
Lapid, the leader of the largest opposition party in Israel, told the Israeli army radio that “nothing good” would come out of plans to establish the “humanitarian city” on the ruins of the city of Rafah.
“It is a bad idea from all possible points of view-security, political, economic, logistics,” he said.
“I do not prefer to describe a humanitarian city as a concentration camp, but if it comes out, it is prohibited, then it is a concentration camp,” he added.
Lapid was Israeli Prime Minister for six months in 2022.
According to the Israeli government, the “humanitarian city” will initially house 600,000 Palestinians who are currently living in tents in the overcrowded area of Al-Mawasi along the southern coast of Gaza. But ultimately, the entire population of the enclave of more than two million people must be moved to it.
Satellite images have shown that Israeli forces have intensified demolition operations in Rafah in recent months. On April 4, the number of buildings destroyed amounted to around 15,800. On July 4, the number had increased to 28,600.
Olmert, who was Israeli Prime Minister from 2006 to 2009, also criticized the Israeli plan.
“It’s a concentration camp. I’m sorry,” he told the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom.
“If they (Palestinians) will be expelled in the new” humanitarian city “, you can say that it is part of an ethnic cleaning,” he said. “When they build a camp where they (foresee)” clean “more than half of Gaza, then the inevitable understanding of the strategy of this (it is that) it is not a question of saving (Palestinians). It is to expel them, repel them and throw them. There is no other understanding that I have at least. “
Ethnic cleaning
Humanitarian officials also said that the Plan for the internment camp in Rafah would lay the basics of the Ethnic Cleaning of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Philippe Lazzarini – Head of the United Nations Agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, which was banned by Israel – asked last week if the plan would lead to a “second Nakba”. The term refers to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their houses during the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
“This would de facto create massive concentration camps on the border with Egypt for the Palestinians, displaced several times through generations,” said Lazzarini, adding that this “would deprive the Palestinians from any prospect of a better future in their homeland”.
The Israeli government insisted that the transfer of Palestinians to the internment camp to Rafah would be “voluntary” while Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump continued to boast their proposal to force all the Palestinians to Gaza out of the enclave.
Netanyahu said at a dinner with Trump last week that Israel was working with the United States “very closely looking for countries that will seek to do what they always say, that they want to give the Palestinians a better future”.
For his part, the American president said: “We have had great cooperation from (countries) surrounding Israel” and “something good will happen soon”.
The neighbors of Israel and other Arab states, however, rejected the plans to move the Palestinians from Gaza, just like the Palestinians of the Coastal Enclave War.
The Reuters news agency, on the other hand, reported that Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private group supported by the United States and Israelis distributing aid to Gaza, had large-scale plans to build large-scale camps called “humanitarian transit areas” inside and perhaps outside the Palestinian territory.
The proposal, created for some time after February 11, describes a vision of “replacing Hamas control over the population in Gaza” by the GHF describing the camps as places where the Palestinians could “temporarily reside, deradicate, reintegrate and prepare to move if they wish”, according to Reuters.
The GHF is the main group that the Israeli army currently allows food to be distributed in Gaza.
The group had installed four distribution sites in the south and center of Gaza, but currently operates a single point near Rafah. Since the start of its operations at the end of May, Israeli forces have killed at least 800 Palestinians looking for help on GHF sites.
Israel wants the GHF to supplant the United Nations in Gaza and support all the aid operations.
Human rights groups and experts claim that the GHF is also one of the Israeli plans to push the Palestinian population to the south and ultimately from the Gaza Strip.
Omar Rahman, a Middle East Council scholarship holder on world affairs, told Tel Aviv Tribune that murders on GHF sites and now the internment plan clearly indicates that “Israel’s ultimate goal here is the physical destruction of Gaza, the designed collapse of the Palestinian company there and the forced deployment of the tape”.
He said that the plan of Israel was to concentrate the Palestinian population and to make “pressure on them so that their choice is daily between famine and the ball”.
“They hope that this will lead to the” voluntary “emigration of Gaza that they are trying to force”, he said, adding that “what Israel is trying to do is creating a concentration camp, which is essentially a maintenance cell until other options are open to depopulate this (zone)”.