‘Flatten’ Gaza, turn it to museum like Auschwitz: Israeli council head

An Israeli council head has called for sending all Gazans to refugee camps in Lebanon and “flattening” the whole besieged area so it becomes an empty museum like Auschwitz.

In an interview with Tel Aviv’s Radio 103FM station on Sunday, David Azoulai said that the Israeli navy should take the Gaza residents to the shores of Lebanon so that they can go to refugee camps, and then destroy Gaza and turn it into a museum resembling the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

“The entire Gaza Strip should be emptied and leveled flat, just like Auschwitz. Let it become a museum, showcasing the capabilities of Israel and dissuading anyone from living in the Gaza Strip. This is what must be done to give them a visual representation,” Azoulai said.

“A security strip should be established from the sea to the Gaza border fence, completely empty, as a reminder of what was once there,” Azoulai said. “It should resemble the Auschwitz concentration camp.”

“Tell everyone in Gaza to go to the beaches. Navy ships should load them onto the shores of Lebanon,” Azoulai added.

Auschwitz, a former Nazi concentration camp, slammed the “terrorist” statement, calling on Israeli authorities to react to such “shameful abuse.”

“David Azoulai appears to wish to use the symbol of the largest cemetery in the world as some sort of a sick, hateful, pseudo-artistic, symbolic expression,” the museum posted on X, formerly Twitter.

“Calling for acts that seem to transgress any civil, wartime, moral, and human laws, that may sound as a call for the murder of the scale akin to Auschwitz, puts the whole honest world face-to-face with a madness that must be confronted and firmly rejected.”

Israel launched a devastating war on Gaza on October 7 after the territory’s Palestinian resistance movements carried out a surprise retaliatory attack, dubbed Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, against the occupying entity.

The relentless Israeli military campaign against Gaza has killed over 19,000 people, most of them women and children, in Gaza since. More than 51,000 individuals have been wounded as well.

The United Nations and aid agencies have said the intensifying Israeli ground offensive is making the whole of Gaza uninhabitable and crippling the humanitarian effort.

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), 1.3 million of the displaced people in Gaza are sheltering in 154 of its facilities, which are extremely overcrowded.

The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, also said, “Gaza’s health system is on its knees and collapsing.”

In the face of the appalling humanitarian situation in the besieged territory, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi strongly condemned Israel over the weekend for “a systematic effort to empty Gaza of its people.”