Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich gives a speech, regarding the ceasefire proposal between Israel and Hamas, in front of the Israeli Parliament in Jerusalem on June 3, 2024 [Saeed Qaq – Anadolu Agency]
Far-right Israeli Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, yesterday urged Israel to impose “ entire civil management of the Gaza Strip,” and announced plans to reduce humanitarian aid to the bare minimum mandated by international law once US President-elect Donald Trump takes office later this month.
According to the Times of Israel, during a Facebook live session, Smotrich, leader of the far-right Religious Zionism Party, also emphasised the term “occupation”, stating: “Yes, occupation, we don’t need to be afraid of this word.”
Throughout the broadcast, he repeatedly issued warnings that Israel was prepared “to unleash the gates of hell on Hamas,” expressing confidence that Trump’s administration would provide both military and diplomatic support for the attacks.
“We’re readying for a new approach to conquering the Gaza Strip, of holding onto it, of dividing it into regional brigades,” he said, calling for Israel to occupy the territory “for a very long time.”
Moreover, Smotrich criticised ongoing negotiations with Hamas aimed at securing a hostage-ceasefire deal. He argued that Israel would have greater leverage in talks once Donald Trump returns to the White House.
“The military pressure will be stronger — not entering and exiting but capturing territory,” he explained.
Smotrich also slammed Israel’s judicial system, claiming it had “completely lost its judgment.” He noted the ongoing case involving the theft and leak of classified Israeli army intelligence linked to the Prime Minister’s Office as a prime example of systemic failure.
“I am not prepared to abandon this important task of investigating October 7 to a system I have no faith in,” he added. “I am in favour of an independent investigative committee that will turn over every stone.”
A demonstrator is seen wearing a placard that calls for the arrest of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the rally. Pro-Palestine demonstrators joined the 21st demonstration organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) since October 2023. (Photo by David Tramontan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The live-documented ethnic cleansing in Gaza, much like in 1948, alongside the expansion of Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank, underscores the true undeclared objectives in Israel’s ostensible “total victory.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that Israel’s war on Gaza will continue until achieving what he terms “total victory.” Instead of critically examining Netanyahu’s vague and open-ended objectives, much of the Western media and many governments frame the onslaught as self-defense, and some even normalize the genocide as a “humane” attempt to “free” Israeli captives.
At the same time, the same pundits decontextualized the Palestinian right to self-defense by ignoring that the October 7 revolt was a direct response to over two decades of Israel’s imposed “starvation diet” blockade on Gaza. Exactly, as the West turns a blind eye, and continues to enable Israel’s theft of Palestinian-occupied land in the West Bank to benefit Jewish-only colonies.
Meanwhile, these media outlets downplay or dismiss Israel’s treacherous undeclared war objectives, even to the detriment of Israeli captives and the immense civilian suffering in Gaza.
For over a year, Netanyahu has prioritized an agenda to reoccupy and to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza rather than engage in negotiations for prisoner’s swap. Especially since the release of Israeli captives would undermine one of Netanyahu’s primary pretexts for pursuing his sinister objectives.
This is only possible in the wake of Western leaders embracing Netanyahu’s racist perspective, focusing only on the well-being of Israeli captives, while ignoring the over 10,000 Palestinian hostages held in Israeli jails, and the welfare of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. For instance, Joe Biden has expressed recently his concern over Netanyahu potentially delaying action to secure the release of Israeli captives until January 20, 2025, while expressing no sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians in 2024 and beyond.
With the conspicuous silence or impotence of world bodies, the Israeli captives became a convenient fig leaf under which Netanyahu saw as an opportunity to reoccupy Gaza. It is worth recalling that in 2005, Netanyahu resigned from the Israeli government in protest against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to “disengage” and remove the Jewish-only colonies from the Gaza strip.
Immediately following October 7, Netanyahu launched a genocidal war, disregarding the Palestinian Resistance’s proposal for prisoner’s exchange. His decision to pursue war instead of negotiations was motivated by several factors:
a) Deflect responsibility for the intelligence failure under his watch. b) Evade scrutiny of his role in facilitating external funding to Hamas. c) Execute a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing to reoccupy Gaza.
The strategy to ethnically cleanse Gaza was openly advocated by Israel’s racist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who three months following October 7 called for Palestinians to leave Gaza. The scion of an Ukrainian immigrant repeated the century-old European Zionist myth of blooming the desert⎯a narrative that not only ignores historical and geographical realities but also contradicts his own Old Testament that once described Canaan, the land of the Filastin (Palestine), as the “land of milk and honey,” before the ancient Hebrews migrated from their original homes to Palestine.
Further, and on January 1, 2024, Smotrich’s fellow racist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir declared in a Knesset speech that Israel should never withdraw from any territory it occupies and explained that the establishment of new Jewish-only colonies in Gaza as “an important thing.” The following day, on January 2, Ben Gvir doubled down, stating that displacing “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians from Gaza would help pave the way for the creation of the new Jewish-only colonies.
More recently, on Monday, November 25, Smotrich declared to the Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing the Jewish-only colonies in the occupied West Bank, “We can and must conquer the Gaza Strip.” He claimed there is “a unique opportunity” with Donald Trump’s election to halve Gaza’s population—a veiled euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Last Thursday, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir echoed similar calls to “reoccupy the Gaza Strip.”
On the ground inside Gaza, the tools of occupation were more explicit in defining the meaning of Netanyahu’s ostensible mantra: “total victory.” Israeli soldiers posed before an orange banner that read, “Only (Jewish-only) settlement (in Gaza) would be considered victory!” Notably, the orange color harkens back to the banners used by the settler movement in 2005 to protest Sharon’s decision to evacuate the Jewish-only colonies from Gaza.
On November 29, Ajith Sunghay, head of the U.N. Human Rights Office for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, stated after visiting Gaza that the “U.N. had been unable to deliver any aid to northern Gaza” due to “repeated impediments or outright rejections of humanitarian convoys by the Israeli authorities.”
Regarding the genocide by terror, U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk reported that residents of northern Gaza are subjected to “non-stop” bombing. Simultaneously, hundreds of thousands have been ordered to evacuate, likely to make way for new Jewish-only settlements.
As part of the forced depopulation of Gaza’s northern region—the most fertile land in the strip—Israel is constructing a topographic barrier to isolate this area from the rest of Gaza. Beginning in early October, Israel carried out extensive controlled explosions, demolishing multi-story buildings to clear a path for a 5.6-mile road cutting across the strip. This road divides Gaza City from the northern towns of Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has characterized this widespread forced displacement as part of an official government policy amounting to “crimes against humanity.”
On November 30, former Defense Minister and IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon confirmed HRW findings, stating that Netanyahu and “far-right” (racist) elements are waging a war of “occupation, annexation, and ethnic cleansing.” He added, “There is no Beit Lahia, there is no Beit Hanoun.”
The live-documented ethnic cleansing in Gaza, much like in 1948, alongside the expansion of Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank, underscores the true undeclared objectives in Israel’s ostensible “total victory.” In this contest, Netanyahu’s deliberate undermining of U.S.-led negotiations for prisoner’s swap exemplifies his quintessential diabolical persona: exploiting the predicament of his own Israeli captives to further his cynical undeclared agenda of slaughtering the “Amalek,” and ethnically cleansing Gaza to pave the way for new Jewish-only colonies.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAGenocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Itamar Ben-Gvir in June 2021. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / שי קנדלר
Following ICC’s issuance of arrest warrants against top Israeli officials over Gaza’s genocide, Ben-Gvir bluntly threatened to escalate the situation in the West Bank, confirming Israel’s disregard of international law.
Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir stormed Ibrahimi Mosque in the city of Hebron (Al-Khalil) in the southern occupied West Bank on Friday, November 22, accompanied by thousands of Israeli settlers.
A Palestinian citizen from a local committee working to defend Hebron city from Israeli violations told Anadolu Ajansı that Ben-Gvir and the settlers escorting him performed Talmudic rituals for the Jewish holiday Chayei Sarah (Life of Sarah) inside the mosque. He added that the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) imposed a curfew on the old city of Hebron, where the Ibrahimi Mosque is located, banning Palestinians from reaching the area during the settlers’ raid.
Meanwhile, the director of the Ibrahimi Mosque Mutaz Abu Sneineh informed media outlets that the IOF closed the mosque to Muslim worshipers and employees through Saturday evening. The Ibrahimi Mosque itself has also been the site of numerous settler attacks. In 1994, extremist settler terrorist Baruch Goldstein entered the mosque during a prayer and open fired, killing 29 Palestinian worshippers and injuring over 100.
While settler violence against Palestinians has a long history that goes back to the period of the British Mandate in Palestine, the rise of extremist leader Ben-Gvir since 2019 has been accompanied by a sharp uptick in attacks and provocative acts. Ben-Gvir has been labelled by Israeli and western media alike as a provocateur, pyromaniac, ultranationalist, and an extremist settler.
Ben-Gvir has been part of Netanyahu’s government, playing a key role in shaping politics and decision making, since 2022 as the Minister of National Security. Ben-Gvir’s illegal attacks and provocations would not be possible without his government’s policies and rhetoric which explicitly back settler violence.
Israel’s new Defense Minister, Yisrael Katz, announced on Friday the suspension of administrative detention for Israeli settlers who carry out attacks against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. The Palestinian Authority slammed Katz’s decision as it would further encourage settlers to commit more crimes against Palestinians.
In a statement issued on Friday, the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates said that Katz’s decision “would encourage supremacist colonists to commit acts of terrorism against Palestinians and their properties and further foster their impunity.” The Ministry also called for effective international action to restrain settler “militias” and protect the Palestinians from their violence.
Katz’s decision may be seen as part of the plan recently declared by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich for the West Bank annexation early November. The plan was re-iterated by Ben Gvir, who called for implementing it in response to the ICC’s issuance of arrest warrants orders for top Israeli officials on Thursday, November 21.
According to analysts, Israeli ministers aim at fueling the situation in the West Bank to find a pretext to end the Oslo Accords which granted the Palestinian Authority self-governance over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and to undermine international efforts for a two-state solution.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) and Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich attend the weekly cabinet meeting in Tel Aviv on 7 January 2024 (Ronen Zvulun/AFP)
Finance minister describes Donald Trump’s election victory as an ‘opportunity’ to extend Israeli ‘sovereignty’ over the entire Palestinian territory
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has told his department to prepare for the annexation of the occupied West Bank in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the US elections.
Speaking at a meeting of his far-right Religious Zionism party, Smotrich said that Trump’s victory provided an “important opportunity” and that “the time has come to apply sovereignty” over the West Bank.
According to a statement from his office, Smotrich said he had instructed Israeli authorities overseeing West Bank settlements “to begin professional and comprehensive staff work to prepare the necessary infrastructure” for extending sovereignty.
As well as finance minister, Smotrich has a role in the defence ministry overseeing illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that his active support and that of UK’s air force has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Forcibly displaced Palestinians flee after an evacuation order by the Israeli military in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on October 23, 2024. (Photo: Rami Zohud/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
“If this process doesn’t stop immediately, hundreds of thousands of people will become refugees, entire communities will be destroyed and the moral and legal stain of this crime will cling to and pursue every Israeli.”
The editors of Israel’s oldest newspaper on Wednesday published an editorial decrying the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from northern Gaza amid a ferocious Israeli offensive there that’s killed more than 1,000 people over the past three weeks.
“For three and a half weeks, Israeli forces have been besieging the northern Gaza Strip,” the editors of the left-wing newspaper Haaretz wrote in Wednesday’s lead editorial. “Israel has almost completely blocked the entry of humanitarian aid, thereby starving the hundreds of thousands of people who live there. Information emerging from the besieged area is only partial, because ever since the war began, Israel has barred journalists from entering Gaza.”
“Israel says it told the residents that they needed to leave northern Gaza, and even now, they can still move southward on routes the army has designated for this purpose,” the editors noted. “Thus the residents, many of whom have already been uprooted two or three times or even more from the places to which they have fled the terrors of war, are now being asked to move again. Yet Israel has refrained from giving the displaced any guarantee that they will be able to return once the war ends.”
“Given this,” they added, “it’s no wonder that grave suspicions have arisen that Israel is effectively perpetrating ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza and that this operation is intended to permanently empty this area of Palestinians.”
“This suspicion fits with both the principles of the ‘Generals’ Plan’ being pushed by Maj. Gen. (Res.) Giora Eiland—a plan Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has denied implementing—and the demands of the Jewish supremacist parties in the governing coalition that are openly pursuing a policy of mass expulsions and the renewal of Jewish settlement in northern Gaza,” the editorial states.
Last week, senior Israeli officials including members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet and far-right Knesset lawmakers gathered near the Gaza border for a conference dedicated to the ethnic cleansing of Arabs and Jewish recolonization in the embattled Palestinian enclave.
“We came here with one clear purpose: to settle the entire Gaza Strip… Every inch from north to south,” settler leader Daniella Weiss told attendees of the rally, which was backed by Netanyahu’s Likud party. “Each of you will witness how Jews go to Gaza and Arabs will disappear from Gaza.”
Ethnic cleansing is both a moral crime and a legal one. Criminal law treats mass expulsions as both a war crime and a crime against humanity. Horrifyingly, some members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government want to commit these crimes. As soon as the war began, they began calling for “erasing Gaza” and for perpetrating a “second Nakba.” But many Israelis made light of such statements, and the law enforcement system, headed by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, refrained from dealing with this incitement to commit crimes.
Now, we can see the results: Israel is sliding into ethnic cleansing; its soldiers are carrying out the criminal policies of the messianic, Kahanist right; and even the opposition on the center and center-left isn’t making a peep. This consensus behind ethnic cleansing is shameful, and every public leader who doesn’t demand an end to the de facto expulsion is supporting this crime and has become a party to it.
“If this process doesn’t stop immediately,” the editors stressed, “hundreds of thousands of people will become refugees, entire communities will be destroyed and the moral and legal stain of this crime will cling to and pursue every Israeli.”
Israel was founded in 1948, largely through the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” Zionist militias—the two most violent of which were led by future Israeli prime ministers—utilized terror tactics including massacres and a death march to force the Indigenous Arabs from their homeland.
United Nations officials and international human rights groups said this week’s Knesset vote to ban the life-saving U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) will exacerbate Israeli crimes in Gaza, including ethnic cleansing.
“Efforts to eliminate UNRWA are illegal under international law and will only amplify the genocide and ethnic cleansing Israel is enacting in Gaza while also undermining long-term prospects for peace,” the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, said Tuesday. “The Israeli government is not only deliberately blocking humanitarian and medical aid to people who are starving and dying, it is undermining support for Palestine refugees and the international legal framework protecting their rights.”
On Monday, Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on Palestine, published a report “contextualizing the situation within a decadeslong process of territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing aimed at liquidating the Palestinian presence in Palestine.”
Albanese’s report was released a day after Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—who supports the “total annihilation” of Gaza and said that killing 2 million Palestinians would be “justified and moral”—reiterated his call for Israeli annexation of the entire West Bank and the expulsion of the occupied territory’s Palestinians.
Israel’s policies and practices in Gaza—where more than 150,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023—are the subject of an ongoing South Africa-led genocide case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that his active support and that of UK’s air force has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspeding 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
