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. “If they [Palestinians] will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing. 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. The attacks were war crimes, Olmert said.