Is Gaza a Concentration Camp?
The concentration camp is a particularly deep low for humanity. Since the middle of the 19th century prisons have been created for groups, identities, allegiances and beliefs. Without trial, simply for being who they are, there have been millions imprisoned and often killed directly because of it. The most horrific, systematic and nationalized example of it was the terrors of Nazi Germany (1933–1945), when the concentration camp was brought to levels of almost unimaginable pain and evil.
Today there is a large group of people, united by nationality, culture, language and belief, that is imprisoned and starving. They are bombed daily, usually when they are going about the business of survival. This is the Gaza Strip and the Palestinians that live there. The Gaza Strip is a narrow, densely populated coastal territory bordered by Israel and Egypt. About 2.2 million Palestinians live there. Governed by Hamas since 2007, after an internal conflict with the Palestinian Authority. Israel and Egypt have maintained a blockade of Gaza since 2007, citing security concerns due to Hamas’s rocket attacks and militant activities.
A concentration camp is a facility where a government detains large numbers of people — often without trial — usually for political, military, or ethnic reasons. Unlike prisons, where individuals are held after judicial processes, concentration camps are typically extrajudicial, and conditions are often harsh and inhumane. The documentation and research on concentration camps is extensive. The contexts for the atrocities they explore is most often nationalism, colonialism and war. They can be wars of independence or colonial and civil conflicts or even international wars between great powers. Occupation is often an element in the concentration camp. It is important to remember the idea of gathering people that can be identified as a group and punishing or detaining them for their membership in this group, be it ethnic, religious or due to their beliefs, politics, sexuality or nationality. It is not difficult to compare this with the present Palestinian situation. Let’s look at how this could be considered.
The History of the Concentration Camp (1896–2025)
It was the Spanish that started it. The concentration camp began in Cuba during its war of independence against Spain, the colonial and occupying power. The Spanish general Valeriano Weyler created reconcentration camps (Spanish: Reconcentración) in Cuba to cut off support for insurgents during the Cuban struggle against colonial rule. Civilians were relocated to these camps, where many died from disease and starvation. Over 400,000 Cubans died because of the Spanish Reconcentration Policy, or 10% of all Cubans. The Spanish were eventually defeated in the conflict, and as a result all the camps were shut down.
The Second Boer War was the context for the development of concentration camps by the British in their Southern Africa colony. Over 26,000 Boer women and children and over 14,000 Black South Africans died due to poor sanitation, disease, and lack of food in British concentration camps between 1899 and 1902 (National Archives UK). With such high number of those killed by the concentration camp system in the Boer War, it is arguable that this is an early modern example of ethnic genocide. Of course it was not the last.
World War One (1914–1918) saw the detention of “enemy aliens” by all parties involved. The Ottoman Empire conducted mass internment and deportation of Armenians during the Armenian Genocide (1915–1917). Although not structured as “camps” in the same bureaucratic sense, concentration centers and forced marches led to mass death. Women, children, and the elderly were sent to desert holding areas like Der Zor, where many perished. At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million Armenians were killed. They died in both massacres and individual killings. They were also killed through systematic ill-treatment, exposure, and starvation (Armenian Genocide).
The development of concentration camps in the interwar period (1918–1939) marks a disturbing evolution in state repression and political control. While concentration camps had existed earlier — in colonial contexts and during wartime — the interwar years saw their expansion and systematization by authoritarian regimes as tools of ideological and political domination. Many countries, including Germany, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, detained perceived “enemy aliens” or political opponents. These were precursors to more systematized detention practices in the 20th century, when political prisoners, and prisoners of conscious or lifestyle were added to the victims of state terror.
The interwar period laid the groundwork for the mass internment and extermination systems of World War II. What began as political detention evolved into systems of mass repression and, eventually, genocide. These camps demonstrated how modern bureaucracies and ideologies could transform state violence into a systematic, normalized feature of governance.
In the Soviet Union from the early 1920s onward saw the development of the Gulag system — Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei (Main Camp Administration). These were labor camps used for political repression (e.g. of “counter-revolutionaries”), economic exploitation (slave labor in mining, construction, forestry). The Gulag expanded dramatically under Stalin during the Great Purge (1936–1938), with hundreds of thousands imprisoned or executed. Inmates included political dissidents, intellectuals, and common criminals. Harsh conditions led to mass deaths from starvation, exposure, and execution.
Meanwhile in Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini, camps were used during colonial wars (especially in Libya and Ethiopia) to suppress resistance. Civilians were forcibly relocated and interned in harsh conditions. Though less industrialized than the Soviet model, Italian camps demonstrated how camps were used for imperial control and racial policy, a technique that would be developed further by the other fascist power at the time.
The first concentration camp in Nazi Germany, Dachau, was established in 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power. The early camps targeted political enemies (communists, socialists, trade unionists). By the mid- to late 1930s, camps began to hold Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others considered “undesirable.” The camps were run by the SS, especially the Totenkopfverbände (Death’s Head Units). These were not yet extermination camps (which came later), but brutality, forced labor, and extrajudicial killings were common. The legal framework was intentionally vague: detainees were held under “protective custody” without trial. Relatives and lawyers usually had no idea where they were or what their crime was.
Under the Nazi regime in Germany, the concentration camp became an elaborate device of state terror and mass extermination. The world had never seen industrial murder of human beings conducted on such a grand scale before. Over six million Jews and millions of others were murdered in the German concentration camps. Such was the horror created by the exposure of these industrial death camps after World War Two ended that they have become synonymous with the words, Concentration Camp. This is totally justifiable as the crimes committed by Nazi Germany should never be forgotten. Sadly however, the concentration camp as an element of human terror did not end with the liberation of Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka or Sobibor.
During the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 2001, Serbian forces operated camps (e.g., Omarska, Manjača, Keraterm and Trnopolje) where Bosniak Muslims and Croats were detained, tortured, and killed in an attempted genocide. These camps were used primarily for ethnic cleansing, a strategy aimed at removing or terrorizing ethnic groups from contested territories. The camps were run by various armed factions, especially Bosnian Serb forces, and were characterized by torture, sexual violence, starvation, forced labor, and executions. Unlike Nazi death camps, the Yugoslav camps were often ad hoc and decentralized, though still systematic. They blurred lines between military detention, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal practice. Rape and gender-based violence were central tools of war, not incidental.
China in the 21st century has been the source of reports documenting the mass detention of Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang in what Chinese authorities call “re-education camps.” International observers classify them as concentration camps due to mass internment, forced labor, and alleged human rights abuses.
As a footnote to the concentration camps of the 20th century, the U.S. government forcibly relocated over 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps during WWII. While not death camps, these involved forced relocation and significant rights violations for an ethnic minority at the hands of an aggressive state apparatus.
With this brief history of the modern concentration camp in mind, we can now turn our attention to the 2.2 million Palestinians detained within the Gaza Strip and determine whether it can be called a concentration camp or not.
Gaza is a Concentration Camp
The key characteristics of concentration camps include indefinite detention without trial, the targeting of specific ethnic, political, or religious groups, harsh conditions, often involving forced labor, starvation, and abuse. Finally, they are used as tools of oppression, control, or genocide. Traditionally, a concentration camp refers to a place where a government imprisons large numbers of people without trial, often based on identity (e.g. ethnicity, religion, political belief), under harsh or inhumane conditions. It does not necessarily imply extermination (unlike death camps, e.g., Auschwitz). In fact, the concentration camp was not invented by the Nazi party of Germany. It was refined to operate on an unprecedented industrial scale by Germany. This terrible accomplishment has not been repeated since then, and we can but hope it never will be. However, the elements of a concentration camp as a device of state terror for the persecution of a specific ethnic minority, have been used since and continue to be used today.
The Gaza Strip is a narrow, densely populated coastal territory bordered by Israel and Egypt. About 2.2 million Palestinians live there. Governed by Hamas since 2007, after an internal conflict with the Palestinian Authority. Israel and Egypt have maintained a blockade of Gaza since 2007, citing security concerns due to Hamas’s rocket attacks and militant activities. The blockade restricts movement of people and goods in and out of the territory. Gaza has been subject to multiple wars and frequent military incursions by Israel, with heavy casualties among civilians.
In the broadest sense there are several conditions present in Gaza today that match those of a concentration camp. These include the mass confinement of over 2 million people, who cannot freely leave Gaza due to Israeli and Egyptian restrictions. The blockade that prevents adequate food and medicines from reaching the people of Gaza, which affects civilians broadly with deaths from starvation and preventable illnesses now common. This blockade is a form of collective punishment specifically directed towards an ethnic group. The harsh conditions that are daily reality for people in Gaza are inhumane. Electricity, water, healthcare, and employment are severely limited. According to the UN, Gaza is now “unlivable”. The lack of sovereignty or mobility that people in Gaza live with daily. Gazans require permits to exit, which are rarely granted even under extreme medical or humanitarian grounds.
More specifically, Gaza resembles a concentration camp due to the systematic and deliberate killing of the people that are confined there. People in Gaza are killed primarily through Israeli military violence, especially aerial bombardment, but also through structural conditions created by prolonged blockade, economic collapse, and war. The high density of Gaza’s population, combined with the absence of safe zones, makes civilian casualties the majority of deaths. Many of these deaths are the result not only of direct attacks but also of the deliberate destruction by Israel of essential life-sustaining systems such as hospitals, ambulances and essential services such as water and electricity. At least 65,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since 7th October 2023. The killing continues as I write these words.
To deny that Gaza is a concentration camp based solely on the idea that a concentration camp is the Nazi iteration is to deny the suffering and historical legitimacy of the victims of the Bosnian, Armenian and Uyghur genocides. Nothing can be denied in the Nazi Holocaust. It will live in infamy forever, but it does not define the concentration camp as a device for human suffering and tyranny. We are sadly seeing that suffering in our own time.
Sources
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-armenian-genocide-1915-16-overview
