(Jerusalem) Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Sunday called for a return of Jewish settlers to the Gaza Strip after the war, saying that the Palestinian population of this territory should be “encouraged” to emigrate to other countries.
“To have security, we need to control the territory and to control the territory militarily in the long term, we need a civilian presence,” Mr. Smotrich said in an interview on Army Radio in response to a question about the opportunity to re-establish Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip.
Israel evacuated its army and some 8,000 settlers from this Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 in 2005, as part of then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal plan.
Mr. Smotrich, head of the “Religious Zionism” party which is part of the ruling government coalition, also estimated that Israel should “encourage” the approximately 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza to leave the territory for other areas. country.
“If we act in a strategically correct way and encourage emigration, if there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million, the whole discourse the day after (war) will be completely different,” he said. -he said.
PHOTO AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Palestinian refugee tents in Rafah, December 31.
“We will help rehabilitate these refugees in other countries in an appropriate and humane manner, with the cooperation of the international community and Arab countries around us,” he added.
Reacting to these comments, Hamas considered that it was “a call to move two million Palestinians” out of the Gaza Strip.
“It is a war crime which adds to the ongoing criminal aggression which has no equal in modern history,” said the Palestinian Islamist movement in power in the Gaza Strip. “Our people will remain firm and unwavering in the face of all attempts to displace them from their lands, until complete liberation,” he added in a statement.
Mr. Smotrich denied the existence of a Palestinian people during a private visit to Paris in March. “There are no Palestinians, because there is no Palestinian people,” he said.
Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip have left 21,822 dead, mostly women, children and adolescents, since the start of the war on October 7, according to the latest report published Sunday by the Hamas government.
They were launched in retaliation for an attack of unprecedented scale carried out by Hamas commandos which resulted in the death of around 1,140 people in Israel, the majority civilians, according to the latest official Israeli data.