A planned ‘humanitarian city’ inside Gaza intended to hold hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would be a ‘concentration camp’, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has warned.
Defence Minister Israel Katz said last week he had told the military to advance plans for the zone, which would eventually contain the entire population of Gaza.
The area would be built on the ruins of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, and once Palestinians enter the zone, they would not be allowed to leave.
Katz also vowed to implement a plan for the emigration of Palestinians from Gaza.
“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” Olmert told The Guardian newspaper on Sunday. “If they (Palestinians) will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing.”
In response to Olmert’s comments, the Prime Minister’s Office called him a ‘convicted felon disgracing Israel on CNN’.
Olmert has previously blasted the conduct of the Israeli military in Gaza and the country’s political leadership. In May, he said he could no longer defend Israel against accusations of war crimes. “What is it if not a war crime?” he asked rhetorically in an interview with CNN. He said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and far-right members of his government are ‘committing actions which can’t be interpreted any other way’.
&uuid=(email))