Israeli Cabinet Minister: 'Only Solution for the Gaza Strip Is to Empty It of Gazans'

Israeli Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman argued Tuesday for ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip of its Palestinian population so that the Jewish people can "inherit the land" many of them believe their deity promised them in biblical times.

"The only solution for the Gaza Strip is to empty it of Gazans," Silman—a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ruling Likud party—said during an interview with Reshet Bet radio, according to a translation by Haaretz. "God has sent us the U.S. administration, and it is clearly telling us—it's time to inherit the land."

Last month, Republican U.S. President Donald Trumpproposed that the U.S. "take over" Gaza, remove it's approximately 2.1 million Palestinian inhabitants, and transform the coastal enclave into the "Riviera of the Middle East."

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Sunday that the so-called "Trump Plan" is currently "taking shape."

"It could be in single-family homes or Trump-style towers, but we will definitely go back there."

Silman said during Tuesday's interview that "Gush Katif will return, there's no question about it," referring to a former block of 17 Israeli apartheid settlements in southern Gaza that were abandoned 20 years ago. "It could be in single-family homes or Trump-style towers, but we will definitely go back there. I see no other solution to terrorism. The answer to terrorism is sovereignty."

While proponents of the plan insist that Palestinians will leave Gaza voluntarily, critics counter that this notion is utterly divorced from reality, as most Gazans are descendants of people who fled or were ethnically cleansed from other parts of Palestine during the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948, and are loath to be subjected to yet another expulsion. Many elderly Gazans are survivors of what Palestinians call the Nakba, or "catastrophe," of 1948.

This isn't the first time that Silman has called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. She made similar comments during a recent rally, and last September she also said that Israel is "on a path to inherit" the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Israel has illegally occupied the territory since 1967, and hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers have steadily usurped Palestinians by building and expanding apartheid colonies on their land.

"We will not 'conquer,'" Silman asserted last year. "Conquer is a progressive word that the progressives brought upon us. We inherit. Inheritance from the lord."

Silman rose to prominence after abandoning the previous Israeli coalition government, prompting a crisis leading to the 2022 election that gave rise to the current far-right administration.

Numerous Israeli politicians, military leaders, journalists, entertainers, and others have called for genocide in Gaza or the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the territory. Statements from Netanyahu, members of his Cabinet, Knesset lawmakers, and others have been entered as evidence in the South Africa-led genocide case against Israel currently before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.

More than 170,000 Palestinians are dead, maimed, or missing, and millions more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened following 15 months of Israeli bombardment and invasion and more than 17 months of "complete siege" of Gaza, according to local and international agencies.

Palestine defenders argue the mass slaughter and annihilation of Gaza meet the definition of genocide under Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. However, according to the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, "To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

"The intent is the most difficult element to determine," the agency stressed. But critics say that comments like Silman's could make the ICJ's final decision much easier.

"Bolstered by the hubris of settler colonial power and the knowledge that it has killed, maimed, destroyed, expelled, humiliated, imprisoned, and dispossessed with more than seven decades of impunity and by the continued material and moral support of the United States, Israelis are explicit and unashamed about their genocidal intent because they have imagined and prosecuted a war against people who they see as colonized 'savages,'" Israeli Holocaust scholar and British law professor Penny Green wrote last year.