It’s hard to explain the feeling of watching your homeland shrink into a cage. To know your family is still inside—crammed into a suffocating corner of what was already one of the most overcrowded places on Earth. 

To hear your mother’s voice tremble as she says they have nowhere left to go. Not north. Not south. Not east. Not even to the sea because the sea now brings only the hum of warships and the echo of explosions. This is Gaza now: a territory reduced to a trap. 

In recent months, nearly two million Palestinians have been pushed into a fragment of land that itself was already a fragment. Gaza is just 365 square kilometres. That means over 2.3 million people are being squeezed into just over 120 square kilometres. That’s a population density of nearly 20,000 people per square kilometre—more than ten times that of London, more than any major city on Earth. 

Schools have become dormitories, floors shared by strangers, and bread has become a memory. There are no tents left. No clean water. No food. And no silence. 

When I call my family in Gaza—those who survived the latest Israeli airstrikes—I hear chaos: babies crying, the crackle of distant explosions, the clinking of empty pots. 

My niece tells me she now shares a floor with eleven others in a school never meant for living. My cousin, a father of four, texted me last week: “We queue two hours for a stale piece of bread. We drink water from puddles. Israel starves us, then bombs us again.”

There’s no exaggeration in this. No need for metaphor. This is what we mean when we say “concentration camp.” 

Yes, I am using those words because what else do you call it to herd a population into an ever-tightening space, to deprive them of food, water, and medicine, to bomb them without exit or reprieve. This is not merely war. What else can we call it when a state designs a system not just of control, but of deliberate, systematic containment and extermination? 

Historically, people hesitate to use that term out of respect for the horrors of the Holocaust. But if we are to honour history, we must learn from it.

In Nazi Germany, concentration camps like Sachsenhausen and Dachau were built to isolate, control, and ultimately destroy groups of people the regime deemed undesirable. 

Gaza today is more densely packed than Dachau ever was. And yet, its inhabitants remain trapped in an open-air prison whose walls are made of history, and indifference. 

Similar structural logic of concentration camps 

Overcrowding: Auschwitz, at its most congested, forced 1,200 bodies into barracks built for 700. Gaza’s southern corridor now holds nearly two million people in a space never meant to sustain such density. It is a place of relentless compression.

Shelter: In Auschwitz, prisoners slept on straw—row after row, shoulder to shoulder. In Gaza, those who find a tent sleep on the ground, if they are lucky. Others rest under plastic tarps, or open skies. Privacy is denied. Women nurse their infants among strangers. Families shelter beneath rubble.

Sanitation: Latrines in Auschwitz were crude but present. In Gaza, sewage seeps into makeshift shelters. Trash mounds fester in the absence of collection. The water is undrinkable. Children bathe in puddles, often the same ones where animals defecate. Illness spreads, unchecked and unacknowledged. 

Medical Collapse: At Auschwitz, illness was part of the system. So too in Gaza. Over 1,400 medical workers have been killed. Hospitals have been bombed or run out of fuel. Children die of wounds no one is left to treat. Mass graves become daily rituals. 

Not collateral damage 

After forcing Palestinians from the northern and central parts of Gaza, Israel funnelled them south, promising safety. But Rafah and Khan Younis became targets. 

The Israeli forces bombed the very areas it had declared “safe zones.” It imposed a total blockade on food, water, medicine, and fuel. And after a brief ceasefire, and then they began bombing again. 

Since then, thousands have been killed. Thousands more injured, many of them women and children. The scale of the suffering is unimaginable, but it is not unintentional. This is not collateral damage. It is a tactic.

I can’t stop thinking about my father, who lived through the Nakba in 1948 and always told us, “They took our land, but not our spirit.” He used to walk the olive groves as a child, barefoot and proud. Now he’s 80, lying on a thin mattress in a tent, watching those same groves flattened—and his grandchildren turned into refugees again, this time atop the rubble of their own homes. 

Some call it ethnic cleansing. Others call it genocide. I call it what my gut tells me: a slow-motion extermination of a people, with the world watching from the sidelines. Gaza is not just under siege. Gaza is being erased. 

I know the weight of these words. I don’t write them lightly. But I write them because I’m tired of euphemisms. Tired of the hollow “both sides” language. Tired of pretending this is a conflict when it is clearly a massacre. 

I write because my siblings no longer have homes. My nephews and nieces no longer have schools. My parents no longer have hospitals. My people no longer have a future—unless we start calling this what it is. 

This is a concentration camp. On our watch.