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 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.