Israel’s extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich incited against Palestinians the hope of rebuilding the Gaza Strip, which has been devastated by the genocide committed by Israel for the past three years, in order to force them to emigrate.
Smotrich acknowledged the failure of the plan to displace Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, noting that Egypt refused to allow them to leave through its territory, and that other countries did not agree to receive them.
The minister, who leads the far-right Religious Zionist party, said that evacuating Palestinian citizens from the Gaza Strip by air requires the approval of the countries that will receive them.
He believed that if each European country accepted between 20,000 and 30,000 Palestinians from Gaza, it would "end the problem," according to his vision.
He added that the countries of the world still refuse to allow the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to their countries, which represents an obstacle to this proposal.
He considered that “the most important key to displacing the residents of the Gaza Strip is to deprive them of hope that the Strip will be rebuilt one day.”
Smotrich said that if Israel annexes the area up to the “yellow line,” and Gaza remains “small, crowded and devastated,” its residents “will understand that there is no point in staying there,” as he put it.
The Israeli occupation army is stationed along what is known as the “yellow line,” a security strip imposed by Israel inside the Gaza Strip, preventing Palestinians from approaching the surrounding areas, while it controls more than 70 percent of the Strip’s area.
Since October 8, 2023, Israel, with American support, has been committing genocide in Gaza, leaving more than 74,000 martyrs and more than 175,000 wounded Palestinians, most of them children and women, and destruction affecting 90 percent of the infrastructure.
Since the beginning of the war of extermination in Gaza, plans to displace Palestinians from the Strip have been put forward, adopted by Israeli officials, before being publicly proposed by US President Donald Trump.
On January 31, 2025, Trump renewed his call to expel Palestinians from Gaza, saying that Egypt and Jordan should take them in, amid widespread Arab and international rejection and warnings that it would constitute a crime of ethnic cleansing.
On February 4 of the same year, Trump revealed a plan for the United States to take control of Gaza after displacing the Palestinians from it to other countries.
He did not rule out the deployment of American forces in the sector at the time, and spoke of a “long-term ownership” of the United States there, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the time welcomed Trump’s proposal, describing it as “the first new idea in years.”
Settlement in the West Bank
In another context, Smotrich boasted about what he called the “settlement revolution” in the occupied West Bank, saying: “Now let’s walk around the new settlements and farms in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and see the revolution with your own eyes. This is amazing.”
Smotrich linked the expansion of settlements and Israeli control over the West Bank to what he described as Israel's security, saying, "This is the security zone of the State of Israel, and in order for all population centers from Beersheba in the south to Afula in the north to remain quiet and safe, we need to be big and strong in Judea and Samaria."
These statements come a day after Smotrich called for a war in the occupied West Bank similar to what happened in the Gaza Strip, for the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority, and for the annexation of parts of Gaza up to the “yellow line.”
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