THE 'humanitarian city' proposed by Israel's defence minister will be a concentration camp and forcing Palestinians inside would be ethnic cleansing, the country's former prime minister has said.
Ehud Olmert told the Guardian Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank and plans for building a camp would mark an escalation.
Israel Katz, the Israeli Minister of Defence, said earlier this month he has ordered Israel’s military to prepare for establishing a camp, which he called a “humanitarian city”, on the ruins of the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
The project is backed by Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Plans would see Palestinians have to go through “security screening” before entering, and once inside would not be allowed to leave.
“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” Olmert said, when asked about the plans laid out by Katz.
Israeli forces would control the perimeter of the camp and plan to initially “move” 600,000 Palestinians into the site, mostly people currently displaced in the al-Mawasi area, Katz reportedly said at a briefing for Israeli journalists.
“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 said. That would be “the inevitable interpretation” of any attempt to create a camp for hundreds of thousands of people, Olmert, who led Israel from 2006 to 2009, said.
He added that after months of violent rhetoric, including calls from ministers to “cleanse” Gaza, government claims that the “humanitarian city” aimed to protect Palestinians were not credible.
He said: “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. There is no other understanding that I have, at least.”
Olmert described extremist cabinet ministers who backed violence in Gaza and the West Bank – where they have authorised major settlement expansions and control law enforcement with a view to expanding the borders of Israel – as the "enemy from within".
Olmert did not consider Israel’s current campaign was ethnic cleansing because, he said, evacuating civilians to protect them from fighting was legal under international law, and Palestinians had returned to areas where military operations had finished.
Last week, Baroness Helana 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 said: “We're seeing the unravelling of the international consensus around that rules-based order that was created after the Second World War."
She said she wanted to see the UK be more vocal in its condemnation and "to call war crimes what they are".
Foreign Secretary David Lammy said Katz's plans were a "sticking point" in ceasefire negotiations.
Olmert spoke on the day funerals were held in the occupied West Bank for two Palestinian men after they were killed by Israeli settlers. He said the attacks were war crimes.
"[It is] unforgivable. Unacceptable. There are continuous operations organised, orchestrated in the most brutal, criminal manner by a large group," Olmert said.
He said attitudes inside Israel might start to shift only when Israelis started to feel the burden of international pressure, as he called for stronger international intervention.
Olmert is working with the former Palestinian foreign minister Nasser al-Kidwa to push for a two-state solution internationally, and believes that a historic settlement could be in reach – an end to the war in Gaza in exchange for normalisation of ties with Saudi Arabia – if only Netanyahu was able or willing to take it.
Over the weekend Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip killed at least 32 people, including six children at a water collection point, while the Palestinian death toll passed 58,000 after 21 months of war, local health officials said.
