Ex-PM Olmert says Israeli plan to create Gaza ‘humanitarian city’ amounts to ‘concentration camp’

Former prime minister Ehud Olmert labels Israel’s plan to move Palestinians in Gaza into a “humanitarian city” as essentially a concentration camp.

“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” Olmert tells the British Guardian newspaper in an interview about the plan laid out last week by Defense Minister Israel Katz.

“If [the 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 says, calling it the “the inevitable interpretation” of the current plan to create a camp for hundreds of thousands of people.

“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 adds.