By Ahmed Al-Sammak and Elis Gjevori
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told his supporters that he is working on finding countries ready to “absorb” Palestinians from Gaza.
The Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom said Netanyahu made the comments at a meeting of his Likud party on Monday, in which he sought to clarify Israel’s plans for after the war had ended.
“Our problem is countries that are ready to absorb them and we are working on it,” Netanyahu said.
“The world is already discussing the possibilities of voluntary immigration,” he said, adding that a team must be established to “ensure that those who want to leave Gaza to a third country can do so. It needs to be settled. It has strategic importance for the day after the war.”
His words align with statements made by other senior Likud figures. Former Likud minister Danny Danon, for example, has publicly called on western states to accept refugees from Gaza.
Palestinians have long said Israel’s current campaign in Gaza is aimed at ensuring their permanent expulsion from the area.
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Israel’s military strategy is seemingly aimed at making Gaza uninhabitable by destroying anything that sustains life, hoping that Palestinians will then “voluntarily” leave.
The US, EU and Middle East countries in particular have rejected a forced ethnic cleansing of Gaza, but Israel has broken red lines set by these countries before with little lasting consequence, if any at all.
Possible destinations for such an exodus include Egypt, Jordan and western states.
Egypt and Jordan have categorically ruled out accepting Palestinians into their borders, a possibility that recalls the Nakba of 1948, in which Zionist militias ethnically cleansed more than 700,000 Palestinians from their historic homeland to make way for the state of Israel.
Military struggles
The news of Netanyahu’s comments comes as the army said it had struck more than 100 targets in 24 hours, including military sites and tunnel shafts in central Jabalia and Khan Younis in the south, as heavy ground combat continued.
A witness from Khan Younis told Middle East Eye that Israel had intensified its bombardments of the city in an unprecedented way on Monday night. The military targeted civilian homes and residential infrastructure, including the vicinity of the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
“The bombing didn’t stop in the night. The shells hit close to us. I was jumping from the intensity,” Younis al-Hallaq said.
At least 20,915 people have been killed in Israel’s bombing campaign and 54,918 wounded since 7 October, the Palestinian health ministry said on Tuesday.
War on Gaza: Hamas leader Sinwar says its fighters are ‘smashing’ Israeli army, will not surrender
Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers continue to suffer heavy casualties in their attempts to seize control of Gaza.
According to the Israeli army, 491 soldiers have been killed since 7 October, with the vast majority being killed on the day itself and at least 156 since the ground invasion began. Hamas claims the actual death toll among Israelis is much higher.
A key aim of the ongoing Israeli campaign is to kill Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who is believed to be hiding in the tunnel system below the territory but one key military leader has claimed it could take up to 10 years to find him.
Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi made the comments in a conversation with a cabinet member, according to Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronot.
Israel says around 874 soldiers have been wounded in Gaza but Israeli media outlets put the number as high as 5,000. News organisations in Israel are subject to military censorship.
Iran tensions
As Israel continues its campaign in Gaza, it is also in confrontation with Iran after killing a high-ranking member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) in an air strike in Damascus on Monday.
Seyyed Razi Mousavi was a senior advisor in the IRGC coordinating between different Iranian-aligned factions in Syria.
Iran has warned Israel it will pay a heavy price for the killing, which comes as the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement continues to trade fire with Israel across Lebanon’s southern border.
This week Netanyahu dismissed a Wall Street Journal report that said US President Joe Biden had prevented Israel from pre-emptively attacking Hezbollah.
“I have seen false publications claiming that the US prevented and is preventing us from operational operations in the region,” Netanyahu said. “This is not true. Israel is a sovereign state. Our decisions in the war are based on our operational considerations and I will not elaborate on that.”
Hezbollah’s entry into the ongoing conflict has been subject to speculation since the 7 October attack.
Comments
8 responses to “Netanyahu looking for countries ‘to absorb’ ethnically cleansed Palestinians”
Miliekowski needs to find places to absorb those murderous eastern europeans that invaded palestine.
Zionist Israelis are the ones who need to be forced out of Palestine. The search that should be made is for countries that will accept this hideous Nazi cult of sick, subhuman monsters.
Paul they would HAVE to accept the zionists because the overwhelming amount of people who live in israel today are European and American and they still have their citizenship in those European and American countries. They are dual citizenship holders. They kept their original citizenships because they knew one day they would need it. From the very start of this when the began migrating from Europe and the US they had their original papers and applied in the US and Europe for all their children to have it and their children applied for their grandchildren and on and on. Nearly every “israeli” today can get their passports and hop on any plain or ship and go to their other country where they have citizenship while Palestinians cannot because they have no citizenship to any where because they were made non citizens in their own homeland when these horrible nazi zionists forced their “israel homeland for the Jew and the Jew only” on top of Palestine.
So the world is just going to sit back and let israel force the Palestinians out of Gaza into other countries that “might be willing to accept them”? Just going to keep destroying Gaza so badly and starving its people and bombing and shooting them until some other country offers them another refugee camp somewhere else? Just going to give the people of Gaza a choice. Leave or die. Then in a year or two we will see Gaza filled up with lovely homes filled with israelis lounging on the beach and no one will give a care less. The Jews really do not care what the world thinks about them as long as they get what they want.
It really does look like a repeat of the beginning of world war II. That is to say around 1933 after the Jewish world council declared war on Germany, the Rothschild Banks of England hired mercenaries from Poland who began murdering ethnic Germans living in the Danzig corridor killing an estimated 80,000 Germans. Later Germany asked the Jews living in Germany, around 500,000 Jews, to leave Germany. The ones that had the wherewithal to leave did so. The ones that did not were placed on ships, planes, and any means possible to get them out of the country. Germany tried several countries for placement of the Jews but nobody wanted them and eventually placed the Jews in concentration camps similar to ones that the US placed Italians, Germans, and Japanese. It is estimated that around 250,000 Jews died of starvation, dehydration, and disease in the camps because Germany was losing the war and couldn’t afford the medication or food needed to maintain the camps. Now the Jews are doing the same thing to the Palestinians only much worse. The white supremist Jews have made it blatantly clear that Jews are sadistic genocidal sickos. The white supremist Jews would be doing the world a favor if they’d leave Palestinian and stop their genocide against the Semitic people of the middle east. Strange how the white Jews call us anti-Semitic when, in fact, it is the white supremist Jews that are anti-Semitic.
You hit the nail on the head Woopy! That is the real story of WW2 that all the history books leave out.
Not only Is it strange that Palestinians are called “terrorists” by the US government it’s totally bizarre that the US government calls people “anti-Semitic” if anything is said about the white Jews. In the first place Jews stole the homes and land from the Palestinians not the other way around, and used terrorist tactics to do it. Not only that, the white supremists of Israel have committed genocide upon the Semitic people of the middle east for more than 70 years. The facts clearly show that it’s the white Jew supremacy that is “anti-Semitic”, not any other group of people. The US propaganda has created a myth (maybe better said, a lie) about what really happened in Palestine.
Canada said they would be willing to accept Palestinians refugees under certain conditions. So there you have one country for a start. Since the United States has taken in more than five million illegal aliens from 140 countries and release them all over the United States, why not accept two million Palestinians as well. Remember, America has made so many mistakes over the last 100 years, what’s one more big mistake to add to America, who has declined so much already.