Israel Katz calls this a “humanitarian city” …. Has he read George Orwell, or did Katz manage to invent this hideous euphemism all by himself?  Let us be frank about the irony and horrendous inhumanity of Israel’s plan. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert responded that Mr Katz was describing a concentration camp. Olmert claimed its construction would constitute an escalation of the Gaza conflict; and that he now considers Israel to be committing war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.

Olmert had earlier (in May 2025) published an OpEd in the Israeli journal Haretz, in which he decribed Netanyahu’s policies as deliberate destruction intended to harm civilians, with no clear vision or plan for Gaza’s future …. And while he did not go so far as calling the military campaign “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing”, he accused the Israeli government and military of “war crimes” because of its deliberate blocking of food, medical and other supplies, and because of the excessive killing.  Analysts put the number of children killed at 20 000, and they are obviously not military members of Hamas (the original enemy).

In July 2025 the criticisms by Mr Olmert (who supported the original military action against Gaza following the 7th October 2023 Hamas terrorism attack) went further: he described the Israel Katz plan as a form of “ethnic cleansing”. Trapping two million displaced Palestinians inside a camp, he told the BBC, with no permission to leave, is intended for deportation rather than protection. Israel is not wanting to protect Palestinians in the Gaza strip: Israel wants them dead (more than 60 000 bodies so far), or exiled (the 2 million). It has become clear that the extremist Netanyahu regime dreams of forcing Palestinians to leave Gaza, and out of the West Bank, so that Israel can expand to occupy and annex all the land “Between the River and the Sea”.

This is no “humanitarian city” that Israel wants to create: it is part of a genocidal plan for Gaza. Would Israel Katz like historians to reclassify Auschwitz and Dachau as “humanitarian cities”?

Israel is starving Gaza, blocking deliveries of food and medicines in order to kill Palestinians. Al Jazeera showed pictures this week of malnourished children in Gaza, whose emaciated bodies immediately recalled the 1945 pictures of Jews starving in the Belsen concentration camp. The governments of USA, Europe and the Arab states remain silent. It is shameful.

Since the rest of the world considers that Binyamin Netanyahu‘s government is committing genocide in Gaza, perhaps we should consider the possibility of renaming the conflict in Gaza to be “the Gaza Holocaust”.

Extremist Zionist readers will accuse me of anti-Semitism: their habitual rubbish propaganda. Like Mr Ehud Olmert, I am against killing, against genocide, against concentration camps. Mr Katz and Mr Netanyahu seem to like these things. They are current Israeli policy.

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Robin Poulton, Chevalier de l’Ordre Royal du Sahametrei (Cambodia), Chevalier de l’Ordre National (Mali), is a member of the TRANSCEND Network who has been working in West African peace and development since 1980. An International Peace Consultant and founder of EPES Mandala Consulting Ltd., former Weapons-for-Development advisor to EU-ASAC, researcher with UNIDIR Geneva (United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research), School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, West Africa Research Association and elsewhere, he is author most recently of Peace Is Possible about peace building and disarmament in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge. Website: https://robinpoulton.com/. Email: poultonrobin@gmail.com