ISRAEL is committing genocide in Gaza – and planning to force Palestinians into “a mass concentration camp”, a leading legal expert has said.
Baroness Helena Kennedy, a KC and director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, was questioned on her use of the term to describe Israel’s plans by BBC presenter Sarah Montague.
It came after Israel Katz, Israel’s defence minister, announced plans to construct a camp on the ruins of the city of Rafah and force all of Gaza’s population of around two million people into it.
Kennedy told the BBC that taking “it to a level where you force people out of the places that they live in and force them into camps, a concentration camp, is absolutely not in accordance with law, but it seems that law doesn't matter anymore”.
The KC went on: “We're seeing the unravelling of the international consensus around that rules-based order that was created after the Second World War.
“Certainly I want to see the United Kingdom being much more vocal in its condemnation of this, and to call war crimes what they are.
“We're listening to the screams of the people who are being torn out of the places in which they have lived and lived with their families as refugees already.”
BBC presenter Montague then questioned the term “concentration camp”.
She said: “You use the words concentration camp. Do you mean that? Because our understanding of concentration camp is surely very different from this.”
As Kennedy asked, “Why?”, Montague went on: “Because concentration camp people were put in, were starved to death within a concentration camp.”
Kennedy responded: “Well, we're witnessing starvation at the moment.”
“I was very reluctant to go there because the threshold has to be very high. There has to be specific intent for genocide, but what we're now seeing is genocidal behaviour.
“Listen to the voices of those who go out and give their volunteered help, and what they're seeing is so shocking.”
Asked if nations like the UK would be complicit in Israel’s crimes, Kennedy said: “Yes.”
She went on: “We become complicit if we do not make it very clear that we oppose what is taking place.
“[French president Emmanuel] Macron is here visiting the King at the moment, but I hope opportunity is taken to discuss as soon as possible what is being contemplated here.
“What is being contemplated is the creation of a mass concentration camp – and using the persecution of these people to have them make the false choice, the coerced choice – we now know about how coercion can operate on the psyche of people, that they end up feeling so hopeless and so in despair that there is nothing for them, that their life is over unless they leave.”
After the interview, Montague read out a definition of a concentration camp from Britannica.
“It is an internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment,” the BBC host said.
Nick Dearden, the director of Global Justice Now, has also described Israel’s plans as a concentration camp.
“It’s a concentration camp. And it will be built in plain site, with effective assistance from western governments,” he said.
“There is no red line. Only resistance will stop the genocide.”
