Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to be deprived of hope that their territory will ever be rebuilt, arguing that doing so would encourage them to leave Gaza.
In an interview with Israel’s Channel 14 on Monday, Smotrich acknowledged that plans to remove Palestinians from Gaza had so far failed, pointing to Egypt’s refusal to allow them to leave through its territory and the unwillingness of other countries to accept them. His remarks were also reported by Anadolu and other outlets covering the interview.
Smotrich, who leads the far-right Religious Zionism party, said moving Palestinians out of Gaza by air would require countries willing to receive them.
He argued that if each European country accepted between 20,000 and 30,000 Palestinians from Gaza, it would, in his words, “end the problem”.
He added that countries around the world continue to refuse to accept displaced Palestinians from Gaza, describing this as an obstacle to the proposal.
Smotrich then identified what he considered the central mechanism for encouraging Palestinians to leave the Strip.
“The biggest key to migration is to take away their hope,” he said, referring specifically to the prospect that Gaza might one day be reconstructed.
According to Smotrich, if Israel were to annex the territory extending to the so-called Yellow Line, while the remaining Palestinian area of Gaza was left “small, crowded and destroyed”, its population would eventually conclude that remaining there had no future.
His remarks explicitly linked the prevention of reconstruction and the permanent reduction of Gaza’s inhabitable territory with a policy intended to encourage Palestinians to leave.
The statements come as reconstruction remains one of the central questions surrounding Gaza, where large parts of the territory remain devastated and millions of Palestinians continue to face severe housing and infrastructure shortages.
