THE Israeli defence ministry has presented Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a cheaper and quicker plan for a concentration camp for Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip, according to reports.
Israel Katz, the Israeli minister, 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.
Plans would see Palestinians have to go through “security screening” before entering, and once inside would not be allowed to leave.
The project is backed by Netanyahu. However, Netanyahu dismissed the first proposition, saying it was far too costly and complicated and ordered the military to propose something cheaper and quicker.
The initial plan was estimated to cost between $2.7 billion and $4bn.
The latest plan is estimated to cost about $1.2bn and the construction of the site – which would provide tents, electricity, water, and food – would take about two months, it said.
The report comes amid widespread criticism of the Israeli scheme that would move 600,000 already uprooted Palestinians into a small piece of land in southern Gaza – a scheme that critics say amounts to the establishment of a “concentration camp” and ethnic cleansing.
Israel's former prime minister Ehud Olmert previously told the Guardian that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank and plans for building a camp would mark an escalation.
“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” Olmert said, when asked about the plans laid out by Katz.
“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.”
