Israeli Rafah plan is ethnic cleansing disguised as aid: Ex-PM Olmert

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: The Guardian
Today 12:29
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Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert warns that "Israel's" planned "humanitarian city" in Rafah amounts to ethnic cleansing, calling it a concentration camp disguised as aid.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert during an interview with The Associated Press in his office in Tel Aviv, occupied Palestine, on May 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in an interview with The Guardian on Monday, said that "Israel's" proposed "humanitarian city" in Rafah is tantamount to ethnic cleansing and would operate as a concentration camp if realized. He warned that the plan, supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Security Minister Israel Katz, represents a dangerous intensification of "Israel's" ongoing violations against the Palestinian people.

"It is a concentration camp. I am sorry," Olmert said, responding to Katz's directive for the military to prepare a blueprint to house 600,000 Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip. Under this plan, Palestinians would be forbidden from leaving the area except to other countries, a restriction Olmert described as an unmistakable form of forced displacement.

"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," he noted, warning that the only logical interpretation of the strategy is one of forcible expulsion.

Humanitarian facade exposed

According to the UN and multiple humanitarian agencies, nearly 800 Palestinians have been killed in recent weeks while attempting to access aid, as Israeli strikes have repeatedly targeted so-called aid distribution zones. Olmert’s remarks come amid growing condemnation of "Israel’s" ongoing operations.

A July 13 report from Reuters detailed how at least eight children collecting water in al-Nuseirat were killed in an Israeli missile strike, with Israeli forces later blaming a "technical malfunction." Human rights groups argue such incidents are not anomalies but part of a systemic pattern of violence targeting civilians under the guise of humanitarian management.

On the ground, the toll is staggering, with over 58,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza since the war began, and more than 1.7 million displaced. Nearly 70% of the territory's infrastructure has been destroyed. Hospitals and health facilities have been bombed into dysfunction, over 900 damaged or flattened, while entire residential neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble.

The humanitarian situation is compounded by the collapse of clean water systems, widespread disease, and near-total food insecurity. Critics argue these conditions render any official language of "humanitarianism" void of meaning.

Displacement blueprint

Olmert said the humanitarian city plan cannot be separated from increasingly extreme rhetoric by cabinet ministers who have openly called to "cleanse" Gaza and pursue settlement expansion.

"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," he said.

Prominent Israeli legal experts and rights advocates have echoed these concerns, warning that under specific conditions, the policy could amount to genocide.

Settler terror

Beyond Gaza, Olmert issued a denunciation of the current government's handling of settler violence in the occupied West Bank, calling the “Hilltop Youth” militias a grave internal threat for committing daily war crimes against Palestinians under the protection of the government.

In remarks for Israeli broadcaster Channel 13 and elaborated further in a column for Haaretz, Olmert characterized the settler groups as organized terrorist militias carrying out a government-enabled campaign of violence, displacement, and land theft against Palestinians.

"War crimes are occurring daily. Jews are murdering Palestinians. Burning them," Olmert said on live television, adding that "The IDF doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. The police shut their eyes."

Known as the "Hilltop Youth," these settler militias consist mostly of radicalized young men entrenched in illegal outposts across the occupied West Bank. Their attacks, according to Olmert, are not the actions of a rogue minority, as often claimed by Israeli officials, but part of a deliberate policy backed by political forces within the Israeli government.

“These militias are not a gang of savages,” he wrote in Haaretz, “but the vanguard of everyone who encourages and inspires them – and covers for them.”

Olmert explicitly linked their actions to senior far-right figures, naming ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Tzvi Succot, and others as part of the political ecosystem that enables settler violence.

"There are people in power who will protect them, as long as they don’t relent," he warned, adding that "Palestinians are assaulted and run off their lands. Their fields are burned. Their homes are burned. Yesterday, an American citizen was beaten on the head with a club and killed."