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In 1516, a 7-acre section of Venice, Italy, was designated as the area where Jews would be required to live. As it was located where a copper foundry had been, it was called by the word for "foundry" in the Venetian dialect: "geto." The practice of forcibly concentrating Jews into such "ghettos" grew, reaching a brutal, murderous climax under the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 40s. The Nazis built hundreds of ghettos in cities they occupied, creating a system of oppression that, for most Jews, led to death on the street or deportation to death camps like Treblinka.

The Warsaw ghetto was the most notorious Nazi ghetto. Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and within a year had constructed the walled ghetto. Close to half a million Jews were imprisoned there. Those who attempted to escape were shot on sight. Germany immediately restricted food and medicine, leading to starvation and disease.

Images of the desperation were actually filmed by Nazi propagandists. Four reels of silent film footage were found in East Germany years after the war. It appears in the 2010 documentary "A Film Unfinished." The footage juxtaposes fabricated scenes of wealthy Warsaw Jews enjoying comfortable lives while outside people dressed in rags beg and others collect the dead from the street. The propaganda film was never completed, hence the documentary's title, but the images of suffering provide a rare look at the inhumanity of the Nazi ghetto.

That was 1942. Now, in 2025, there is another embattled enclave where people of one ethnicity are imprisoned, dying of starvation and disease, shot on sight if they try to escape. This is Gaza, a manufactured hell on Earth that can only be described as a ghetto.

This comparison is not new. Two months after Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, surprise attack on Israel, The New Yorker published an essay by Masha Gessen, titled "In the Shadow of the Holocaust." In it, Gessen makes the comparison between Jewish ghettos under the Nazis and conditions in Gaza. Explaining the point on the Democracy Now! news hour at the time, Gessen said:

"The similarities are so substantial that they can actually inform our understanding. What's happening now is that the ghetto is being liquidated.

"That's important to say, not just because it's important to describe things in the best possible way that we can, but because, again, in the name of 'never again,' we have to ask if this is like a ghetto. If what we're witnessing now in this indiscriminate killing, in an onslaught that has displaced almost all the people of Gaza, that has made them homeless, if that is substantially similar to what we saw in some places during the Holocaust, then what is the world going to do about it? What is the world going to do in the name of 'never again?'"

Israeli-American scholar Omer Bartov, Brown University professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, told Democracy Now! of the increasing consensus among academics that Israel's attack on Gaza amounts to genocide. He described Israel's plan to build a "humanitarian city" to house 600,000 Palestinians there as "a sort of combination of ghetto and concentration camp, that would be built on the ruins of Rafah. ... This is extraordinary. The state of Israel publicly is speaking about the creation of a vast concentration camp whose goal is removal of the population."

Well over 100 Palestinians in Gaza have starved to death, and counting. U.N. special rapporteur Michael Fakhri, on the right to food, said on Democracy Now!:

"This is the fastest famine we've seen, the fastest starvation campaign we've seen in modern history."

The U.N.'s aid distribution has been essentially shut down, replaced with the shadowy U.S. and Israeli-backed so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Palestinians swarm the inadequate sites seeking food; over 1,000 have been killed there so far, fired upon by the Israeli military and U.S. mercenaries.

Mahmoud Alsaqqa, Oxfam's emergency food security lead in Gaza, appeared on Democracy Now!, having himself lost over 30 pounds during Israel's war on Gaza.

"This is happening in front of all the world," he said. "All the world is watching this heartbreaking, without taking concrete action."

The Warsaw ghetto's Jews launched an uprising, temporarily halting the death camp deportations. By mid-1943, the uprising had been crushed, the remaining ghetto residents killed. Monuments to the ghetto and the uprising dot Warsaw now.

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu want all Palestinians removed from Gaza, in what would be a criminal act of mass ethnic cleansing. Trump wants the U.S. to own Gaza and build what he calls the "Riviera of the Middle East."

There are more than 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza ghetto, now more than ever in need of food, aid, solidarity and action from us all.

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Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,400 stations. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan and David Goodman, of the New York Times best-seller "Democracy Now!: 20 Years Covering the Movements Changing America."

(c) 2025 Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Distributed by King Features Syndicate