The “humanitarian city” Israel’s defence minister has proposed building on the ruins of Rafah would be a concentration camp, and forcing Palestinians inside would be ethnic cleansing, Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert has told the Guardian.
Israel was already committing war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, Olmert said, and construction of the camp would mark an escalation.
“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” he said, when asked about the plans laid out by Israel Katz last week. Once inside, Palestinians would not be allowed to leave, except to go to other countries, Katz said.
Katz has ordered the military to start drawing up operational plans for construction of the “humanitarian city” on the ruins of southern Gaza, to house initially 600,000 people and eventually the entire Palestinian population.
“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, he said.
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.
The “humanitarian city” project is backed by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israel’s refusal to withdraw from the area Katz envisages for the camp is a sticking point in the faltering negotiations for a ceasefire deal, Israeli media have reported.
Olmert said that after months of violent rhetoric, including calls from ministers to “cleanse” Gaza and projects to build Israeli settlements there, government claims that the “humanitarian city” aimed to protect Palestinians were not credible.
“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.”
Israeli human rights lawyers and scholars have described the plan as a blueprint for crimes against humanity and some have warned that if implemented, “under certain conditions it could amount to the crime of genocide”.
Other Israelis who have described the planned “humanitarian city” as a concentration camp have been attacked for invoking comparisons to Nazi Germany, when the government says it is designed to protect Palestinians. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial centre, accused one journalist of “a serious and inappropriate distortion of the meaning of the Holocaust”.
Olmert, who led Israel from 2006 to 2009, spoke to the Guardian on the day funerals were held in the occupied West Bank for two Palestinian men, one an American citizen, who had been killed by Israeli settlers.
The latest deaths came after a campaign of violent intimidation that has forced the residents of several villages to flee their homes over the past two years.
The attacks were war crimes, Olmert said. “[It is] unforgivable. Unacceptable. There are continuous operations organised, orchestrated in the most brutal, criminal manner by a large group.”
The attackers are often called “hilltop youth” in Israel and described as fringe extremists. Olmert said he preferred the term “hilltop atrocities” to describe the young men whose campaign of spiralling violence was carried out with near-total impunity.
“There is no way that they can operate in such a consistent, massive and widespread manner without a framework of support and protection which is provided by the [Israeli] authorities in the [occupied Palestinian] territories,” he said.
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 a greater threat to the country’s long-term security than any external foe. “These guys are the enemy from within,” he said.
Extreme suffering in Gaza and settler atrocities in the West Bank were fuelling growing anger against Israel that cannot all be written off as antisemitism, Olmert said.
“In the United States there is more and more and more expanding expressions of hatred to Israel,” he said. “We make a discount to ourselves saying: ‘They are antisemites.’ I don’t think that they are only antisemites, I think many of them are anti-Israel because of what they watch on television, what they watch on social networks.
“This is a painful but normal reaction of people who say: ‘Hey, you guys have crossed every possible line.’”
Attitudes inside Israel might start to shift only when Israelis started to feel the burden of international pressure, he said, calling for stronger international intervention in the absence of serious political opposition at home. He also criticised the Israeli media for its failure to report on violence against Palestinians.
Olmert backed the initial campaign against Hamas after the 7 October 2023 attacks. But he said that, by this spring, when the Israeli government “publicly and in a brutal manner” abandoned negotiations for a permanent end to fighting, he had reached the conclusion his country was committing war crimes.
“Ashamed and heartbroken” that a war of self-defence had become something else, he decided to speak out. “What can I do to change the attitude, except for number one, recognising these evils, and number two, to criticise them and to make sure the international public opinion knows there are [other] voices, many voices in Israel?” he asked.
He attributed what he called war crimes to negligence and a willingness to tolerate unconscionable levels of death and devastation, rather than an organised campaign of brutality. “[Did commanders] give an order? Never,” Olmert said.
Instead, he believes the military looked away when things were done that would inevitably “cause the killing of a large number of non-involved people”. He said: “That is why I cannot refrain from accusing this government of being responsible for war crimes committed.”
Despite the devastation in Gaza, as the last Israeli premier to seriously attempt to reach a negotiated solution with Palestinians, Olmert still hopes that a two-state solution is possible.
He is working with the former Palestinian foreign minister Nasser al-Kidwa to push for one internationally, and even 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.
Instead Olmert was stunned to see Netanyahu, a man who has an arrest warrant for war crimes from the international criminal court, nominating Donald Trump for a Nobel peace prize.
Additional reporting by Quique Kierszenbaum