When Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad turned 100 earlier this year, he marked his birthday by following a lifelong routine of discipline: he ate little, worked a lot, and did not succumb to the lure of rest.

“The main thing is that I work all the time. I don’t rest myself,” Mahathir told Al Jazeera.

“I am always using my mind and body. Keep your mind and body active, then you live longer,” he said.

From a desk at his office in Putrajaya city, south of the capital, Kuala Lumpur, he spent his centenary like most days: penning his thoughts on the Malaysian economy, the country’s political situation and unfolding world events, particularly the situation in Gaza.

Sitting down with Al Jazeera for an interview after recovering from a spell of exhaustion around the time of his birthday, Mahathir predicted that Israel’s ruthlessness against the Palestinian population of Gaza would be etched into world history.

Israel’s killing of nearly 66,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority women and children, will be remembered for generations, possibly for “centuries”, Mahathir said.

“Gaza is terrible. They killed pregnant mothers… babies just born, young people, boys and girls, men and women, the sick and the poor… How can this be forgotten?” he asked.

“It will not be forgotten for maybe centuries,” Mahathir said.

Describing the war in Gaza as a genocide that parallelled the killing of Muslims during the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s and the Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II, Mahathir said he was confounded that the people of Israel, who had experienced genocide, could, in turn, perpetrate a genocide.

“I thought people who suffered like that would not want to visit it on other people,” he said. Victims of a genocide should “not want to wish their fate to befall other people”.

However, in the case of Israel, he was wrong, he said.

At the height of his power in the 1980s and 1990s, Mahathir earned a reputation on the world stage as an outspoken voice for the Global South, and a vocal critic of Western imperialism and its contemporary exploitation of developing countries through flows of financial capital.

A staunch and lifelong supporter of the Palestinian cause, Mahathir was also roundly criticised for making “anti-Semitic” statements alongside his tirades against the West, particularly the United States.

But, as he told Al Jazeera, he had sympathised deeply with the Jewish people when the horrors of the Nazis became known after World War II.

Israelis, he now says, “did not learn anything from their experience”.

“They want the same thing that happened to them, they want to do it to the Arabs,” he said.

Now, the only “reasonable” way to address the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people is to implement a two-state solution, he added. But Mahathir said that such a solution – which received a major boost when Palestinian statehood was recently recognised by Australia, Belgium, Canada, France and the United Kingdom, among other countries – is still a very long way off, and he would not live to see it.

“In my lifetime, no. Too short a time,” he said.