Criticism of the plan, announced by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz last week, to build a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, in the southern end of the Gaza Strip, is on the rise within Israel. In a series of posts on X, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid called the plan an expensive fantasy of Netanyahu’s far-right partners, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who favor the reestablishment of Israeli settlements in Gaza, reported the Times of Israel. He wrote further that the $4.5 billion that the plan is estimated to cost could be better spent on education, or lowering Israel’s cost of living.
Lapid also tweeted an excerpt from an interview he gave to Army Radio, in which he called the plan “a bad idea from every possible perspective,” and said it would force Israel “to have no choice but to stay in Gaza.” In that interview, Lapid also said: “What is this ‘humanitarian city? Will it be permitted to exit it? If not, how will this be enforced? There will be 600,000 people with a fence around them. I really don’t like people saying ‘concentration camp’—there are comparisons that cannot be made—but if people can’t leave, it’s a detention camp, and if people can leave, there is no humanitarian city.”
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had no problem calling the supposed “humanitarian city” what Lapid would not, however. “It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” he told The Guardian, when asked about Katz’s plan. “If they [Palestinians] will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city,’ then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing. It [ethnic cleansing] 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. “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.”
