By Wallace Mawire
Palestine Ambassador in Zimbabwe Dr Tamer Almassri has issued an urgent and grave warning against the latest evacuation orders issued by the Israeli occupation authorities, targeting hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza and Gaza City, forcing them into displacement once again toward Khan Younis, a region that has already witnessed horrific Israeli attacks on makeshift shelters and refugee camps, resulting in massacres of innocent civilians.
He said the orders, issued under the pretext of preparing for large-scale military operations, represent a dangerous escalation in Israel’s systematic policy of forced displacement. He said they are a continuation of its colonial project aimed at depopulating northern Gaza, entrenching military and settler control, and mass-concentrating the Palestinian population into a narrow corner of the south effectively transforming southern Gaza into the largest open-air detention camp in modern history.
The Ambassador said the orchestrated attempt to create a massive humanitarian concentration zone evokes the darkest chapters of human history from ethnic cleansing in the Balkans to the genocidal campaigns against the Rohingya and most notably, it draws chilling parallels to the Nazi ghettos of the 1930s and 40s, where targeted communities were forcibly confined in overcrowded, squalid conditions before facing mass extermination.
The Ambassador said what Israel is doing today mirrors, in disturbing fashion, the very same fascist tactics employed by the Nazi regime: besieging civilian populations, denying them food, water, and medicine, targeting shelters and hospitals, and using terror as a tool of control and domination. He said it is a grotesque irony and moral tragedy that the state which claims to speak in the name of Holocaust victims is now perpetrating, with shocking impunity, similar atrocities against another indigenous people.
The Ambassador said the world’s silence or inaction in the face of the crimes is not neutrality but is complicity. He said it constitutes a betrayal of the very principles of international law and human dignity that the global community swore to uphold in the aftermath of World War II. He said the lessons of Nuremberg, the Geneva Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are being openly defied.
Ambassador Almassri had called on the international community including governments, human rights institutions, civil society, and individuals of conscience to take immediate and concrete action to stop the criminal policies of Israel’s far-right regime, led by figures such as Benjamin Netanyahu, whose leadership is said to embody a modern-day brand of fascism, rooted in racial supremacy and settler-colonial ideology.
He further affirmed that the Palestinian people, despite the suffering and unimaginable injustice they endure, will never abandon their land. He said they remain steadfast in their legitimate struggle for freedom, dignity, and national liberation through all means guaranteed under international law until the end of occupation and the full restoration of their rights.
The Ambassador said history will not forgive the bystanders and justice will not be denied.