Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Sunday, December 31, called for a return of Jewish settlers to the Gaza Strip after the war. He believes its Palestinian population 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 on the advisability of re-establishing 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 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal plan.
Negation of the existence of a Palestinian people
“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 [the war] will be completely different,” Mr. Smotrich said. “We will help rehabilitate these refugees in other countries in an appropriate and humane way, with the cooperation of the international community and Arab countries around us,” he added.
Mr. Smotrich denied, during a private visit to Paris in March, the existence of a Palestinian people. “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 deaths of around 1,140 people in Israel, the majority civilians, according to the latest official Israeli data.
