Media’s Grotesque Holocaust Dog Whistle: ‘Internment Camp’ Lie Built on Retracted Reuters Claim

The Guardian described Israel as having drawn up “plans for an internment camp on ruins of Rafah,” in an analysis piece by Emma Graham-Harrison, the paper’s newly appointed Jerusalem-based Middle East correspondent.

The BBC reported “plans to move Gaza’s population to camp in Rafah.”

ABC Australia ran a headline referring to the construction of a “large-scale camp,” citing so-called “human rights lawyers” who had denounced the proposal.

Germany’s DW News presented it as a foregone conclusion: “Israel to confine Gazans in camp near border.”

And the Irish Times went even further, dropping the pretense. A recent op-ed accused Israel of creating “ghettos” for Gazans.

The implication is chillingly clear. The Jewish State, they suggest, is now echoing the crimes once committed against its own people. Israel, the inheritor of Holocaust memory, has become a Nazi regime. The grotesque irony is not lost on the editors who chose these headlines. It is intentional.

And it is also clearly a lie.

Have you seen the media claim Israel is planning to build concentration camps in Gaza?

Here’s what you need to know. pic.twitter.com/fuTyx2VW2G

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) July 9, 2025

The claim that Israel is planning “internment camps” or “ghettos” is not grounded in fact. It stems from a statement by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, who said he had instructed the IDF to prepare a plan to establish a “humanitarian city” in the southern Gaza Strip.

At no point — in English or Hebrew — did Katz use the word “camp,” nor did he imply mass internment or forced confinement.

According to Katz, the plan involves relocating approximately 600,000 Palestinians, primarily from the al-Muwasi area, into a new protected zone where humanitarian aid could be safely delivered. Individuals would undergo security screening to prevent Hamas terrorists from embedding themselves among civilians.

Even Haaretz, hardly a defender of the Israeli government, reported that the plan is unlikely to move forward due to concerns over its feasibility. There is no finalized proposal. No construction has begun. No orders have been given. It remains a theoretical contingency in a war where Hamas deliberately uses civilians as shields, and aid delivery is perilously complicated.

Worse still, Reuters, which initially reported on the plan using documents allegedly created by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and presented to the US embassy in Jerusalem, was forced to retract the claim. GHF publicly stated it had never authored the documents nor discussed them with any US officials. The “evidence” used to justify these incendiary headlines has collapsed.

So how did a hypothetical “humanitarian city” become an “internment camp” in the eyes of the global press?

The answer lies in a familiar media formula: strip Israeli proposals of all humanitarian intent, apply vocabulary that invokes the Nazi regime (a clear breach of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism), then quote human rights groups to legitimize the distortion. The result is a fabricated atrocity designed to illicit outrage.

Holocaust dog-whistles are not new in this war. But they are especially grotesque when directed at a nation fighting a terrorist group with actual genocidal intent. Hamas has openly declared its goal to annihilate Israel. And on October 7, 2023, it gave the world a glimpse of what that looks like when its fighters raped, mutilated, and murdered Israeli civilians in their homes.

Finally, Gaza — any part of it — is not a concentration camp. According to a report published Tuesday by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, approximately 100,000 Palestinians have left Gaza since the start of the war. Whatever else one might argue, the idea that civilians are being herded into camps and forcibly confined simply does not hold up.

The media’s casual flirtation with Holocaust inversion is not just offensive. It is factually wrong and morally repugnant. And in an era of rising global antisemitism, it must be called out for what it is — incitement against Jews.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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