‘Go to another country’: Israeli minister tells Gaza residents amid Hamas war | World News

A senior far-right member of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government said that Gaza could not survive as an independent entity after war. It would be better for Palestinians to leave for other countries, Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who heads one of the religious nationalist parties in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, said.

The minister supported a call by two members of the Israeli parliament who wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial that Western countries should accept Gazan families who expressed a desire to relocate. The comments underscore fears in much of the Arab world that Israel wants to drive Palestinians out of Gaza Strip.

“I welcome the initiative of the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world,” Bezalel Smotrich said in a statement, adding, “This is the right humanitarian solution for the residents of Gaza and the entire region after 75 years of refugees, poverty and danger.”

An area as small as the Gaza Strip without natural resources could not survive alone, he said as “the State of Israel will no longer be able to accept the existence of an independent entity in Gaza”.

This comes as Gaza Strip, home to some 2.3 million people, most of them refugees after earlier wars, has been bombarded by Israel in retaliation for the October 7 attack by Hamas. The terrorist group killed some 1,200 people and took around 240 as hostages back into Gaza, according to Israeli official figures.

More than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed during the weeks-long Israeli bombardment of Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities. The Israeli military has also told residents of northern Gaza to leave their homes and head to the southern end of the Strip, where it said they would be safer.