Israeli official calls for concentration camps in Gaza

Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, Moshe Feiglin, has called for the use of concentration camps for the “conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters.”

Sharing a plan for the destruction of Gaza in a letter addressed to Netanyahu on his Facebook page on August 1, Feiglin wrote “What is required now is that we internalize the fact that Oslo is finished, that this is our country – our country exclusively, including Gaza.”

Feiglin’s comments come after one of his far-right Knesset colleagues Ayelet Shaked previously called for the mothers of Hamas members to be targeted.

In his letter, Feiglin urged Netanyahu to “turn Gaza into Jaffa, a flourishing Israeli city with a minimum number of hostile civilians,” in reference to a Palestinian coastal city that was ethnically cleansed by in 1948 and incorporated into present-day Israel.

He called for tent encampments where the Palestinian civilian population would be “concentrated” to be established along the Sinai border until relevant emigration destinations are determined, adding that the supply of electricity and water to the formerly populated areas will be disconnected while they are “shelled with maximum fire power” in order to destroy the civilian and military infrastructure of Hamas as well as its means of communication and of logistics.

“Those who insist on staying, if they can be proven to have no affiliation with Hamas, will be required to publicly sign a declaration of loyalty to Israel, and receive a blue ID card similar to that of the Arabs of East Jerusalem,” he said.

Feiglin, who in January blasted Netanyahu for allowing his son to date a non-Jew, or a ‘Gentile’, also caused uproar among Palestinians when he participated in a raid on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, in East Jerusalem in March.

The death toll since Israel began pounding the Gaza Strip on July 7 has reached 1821, including at least 401 children, 238 women and 74 elders, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.

At least 64 Israeli soldiers have also been killed in battles with Palestinian fighters and three civilians in rocket attacks.