Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has threatened that Gaza will be entirely destroyed before its residents are displaced to other countries, after the Israeli military called up tens of thousands of reservists to expand the war.
“Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to... the south to a humanitarian zone without Hamas... and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries,” the far-right minister said on Tuesday while addressing a conference about Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Israel has imposed a total blockade on the entry of food, medicine, and fuel to Gaza since mid-March after it broke a fragile ceasefire agreement with Hamas and resumed the genocidal war on the enclave.
Israeli officials have said that the new offensive, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday would expand, is aimed at pressuring Hamas to release the remaining Israeli prisoners still being held in Gaza.
Basem Naim, a senior Hamas leader and former health minister in Gaza, dismissed the idea of ceasefire negotiations with Israel as pointless as long as the Israeli regime continues to wage a “hunger war” in Gaza.
“There is no sense in engaging in talks or considering new ceasefire proposals as long as the hunger war and extermination war continue in the Gaza Strip,” he told AFP.
Naim called on the international community to put pressure on Netanyahu and his cabinet to put an end to “crimes of hunger, thirst, and killings” in the besieged territory.
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