During the Italian colonization of Libya, the Kingdom of Italy established several concentration camps as part of its efforts to suppress resistance and control the local population.

The conquest of Libya took place in two phases; the first was considered a more superficial and approximate stage, it began on the 4th of October 1911 under Giovanni Giolitti’s command.

[3] The landless and sharecropping peasants in the south were putting pressure on the Italian ruling elites claiming land and voting rights.

Following a series of riots and rebellions in the south, the ruling classes attempted to find a solution to this problem by relocating Italian peasants in colonies.

These farms were ready in seven months; the colonists walked into efficiently constructed white farmhouses with irrigating aqueducts, asphalt roads and private lands that averaged thirty-seven acres.

Italy was enthusiastic about this project because the country wished to achieve self-sufficiency in the production of corn and oil and furthermore because they had estimated that by 1943 the national population living in Libya would reach 100,000 of which an approximate 40,000 men representing a strong military reserve in a strategic corner of the Mediterranean.

[2] The face of the armed Arab opposition mainly happened in Cyrenaica under the leadership of Omar Mukhtar, where Italian forces under the Generals Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani waged punitive pacification campaigns which turned into brutal and bloody acts of repression.

[4] However, with the arrival of Mussolini, the generals were given the command to stop compromising with the resistance and to defeat it with violence at whatever cost in order to free the land for settlement.

Soon afterwards, the colonial administration began the wholesale deportation of the people from the mountains of Jebel Akhdar, to deny the rebels the support of the local population.

[6] Fascist Italy maintained several concentration camps in Cyrenaica (Eastern Libya) during the later phase of its occupation of that country.

[9] Ilan Pappé estimates that between 1928 and 1932 the Italian military "killed half the Bedouin population (directly or through disease and starvation in camps).

However, the Libyan colonization can be considered genocide because the population was killed intentionally and the cultural, biological and economic basis of the community was completely destroyed and replaced.

[9] On 30 August 2008, Gaddafi and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi signed a historic Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation treaty in Benghazi Under its terms, Italy will pay $5 billion to Libya as compensation for its former military occupation.