Critics Aghast at Israel's Push for Gaza 'Concentration Camp'

The Israeli government's new plan to push all residents in Gaza to live in a camp built atop the ruins of the city of Rafah is drawing heavy criticism from experts who see it as a precursor for ethnic cleansing.

In an interview with The Guardian, Israeli human rights attorney Michael Sfard accused Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz of laying out "an operational plan for a crime against humanity" with his announcement this week of an initiative to build a massive refugee camp at Rafah from which Palestinians would not be allowed to leave. Katz characterized the proposed camp as a "humanitarian city."

Sfard said that the entire camp was being built as a pretext for the mass deportation of Palestinians from Gaza.

"It is all about population transfer to the southern tip of the Gaza Strip in preparation for deportation outside the strip," he told The Guardian. "While the government still calls the deportation 'voluntary,' people in Gaza are under so many coercive measures that no departure from the strip can be seen in legal terms as consensual. When you drive someone out of their homeland that would be a war crime, in the context of a war. If it's done on a massive scale like he plans, it becomes a crime against humanity."

Dr. Amos Goldberg, a historian of the Holocaust at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, picked apart the Israeli government's claims that the camp in Rafah would be a "humanitarian city" where Palestinian civilians could live safely away from Israeli military operations being conducted against Hamas fighters.

"It is neither humanitarian nor a city," Goldberg explained. "A city is a place where you have possibilities of work, of earning money, of making connections and freedom of movement. There are hospitals, schools, universities and offices. This is not what they have in mind. It will not be a livable place, just as the 'safe areas' are unlivable now."

Ihab Hassan, a Palestinian human rights activist and director of the Agora Initiative, expressed a similar sentiment in an interview with The National.

"Israel's Defense Minister Katz isn't even hiding it any more—he's openly calling for a concentration camp for Palestinians in Gaza," he said.

Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of the Refugees International advocacy group, told Reuters that he wasn't at all buying the Israeli government's stated humanitarian intentions regarding the construction of the camp.

"There is no such thing as voluntary displacement amongst a population that has been under constant bombardment for nearly two years and has been cut off from essential aid," he said.

Reuters reported Monday that a $2 billion plan for so-called "humanitarian transit areas" inside Gaza was recently discussed in the Trump White House.

President Donald Trump earlier this year called for the mass removal of Palestinians from Gaza so that the area could be rebuilt as an international beach resort that he described as the "Riviera of the Middle East."