Israel: "We should halve Gaza's population in 2 years."
Israel's finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has offered yet more evidence of Israel's genocidal intent: but the Western media ignores it, as it continues to cover up genocide.
From the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, I’ve tried to emphasise in my coverage a central fact: that Israeli leaders and officials have made their intentions to commit war crimes, to commit crimes against humanity and indeed to commit genocide very clear throughout.
And so it remains. Bezalel Smotrich is the finance minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, who has a history of making statements underlining support for war crimes and genocidal intent long before 7th October.
In April, the editorial of Israeli newspaper Haaretz was entitled ‘Smotrich Must Pay the Price for His Repeated Calls for Genocide of Palestinians’. The newspaper noted he had declared - in reference to cities in Gaza:
"There are no half-jobs. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total destruction. 'Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.' There is no place for them under heaven."
As Haaretz correctly concluded: “Plain and simple – total destruction. There is no room for interpretation.” They rightly stated that he was “openly advocating genocide’” and yet remained in government.
In August, Smotrich declared in a speech that it may be “justified and moral” to starve the people of Gaza: and of course Israel has pursued a deliberate policy of starvation in Gaza.
In the latest speech, Smotrich has declared that Israel must permanently occupy Gaza and thin out its population, more than halving the population within two years:
To quote:
“It is possible to create a situation that Gaza, in two years, has less than half of its current population.”
He talks there about supposed voluntary migration: clearly no such things exists - the people of Gaza did not want to be driven from their homes: what he is referring to is the conditions of Gaza being made unbearable for the Palestinian civilian population - including the Israeli army’s daily mass violence - to drive them out. In other words, ethnic cleansing.
As he knows from his support of starvation, depriving civilians of the essentials of life, the use of mass violence, the destruction of the healthcare system, and so on - all of this is causing an unknown spike in what is clinically described as the ‘excess death rate’ - that is, the number of deaths above what is projected from natural attrition. All the evidence of conflicts involving intense levels of destruction tell us that most people do not die of direct violence, they die from other causes, like the lack of healthcare.
It is notable too that he refers to this strategy of collapsing the civilian population as being a model elsewhere - notably the West Bank, which he labels with the Biblical term ‘Judea and Samaria’, and Lebanon.
And if you think there is room for doubt, let’s listen to what he says subsequently in this speech:
‘What’s important is that we beat the hell out of them. And we’ll continue to beat it. We won’t let them rebuild. And anyone who lifts his head will get beat.’
He goes on: ‘Nothing makes a move and what moves - dies. That’s all. And is attacked and annihilated.’
Clear, straightforward genocidal intent. Once again, note the role of the Western media here. There is barely any coverage of these comments. The finance minister of Israel is openly committing to having the Palestinian population of Gaza in two years, and this is apparently not deemed newsworthy.
As I keep on trying to emphasise, the Western media not only failed from the start to frame their coverage around these statements of intent by Israeli leaders - which proved the most accurate predictor of what indeed Israel went on to do - they generally failed to report them and when they did, buried them and stripped them of significance.
Some wider context. As the brilliant Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada says in reference to new reports:
“Israeli experts estimate Gaza's reconstruction will cost $100-$200 BILLION to restore buildings to "the lowest standard" That's 575%-1150% the size of the entire Palestinian economy. This is what we mean by genocide: Israel ensured it'd be impossible for Gaza to sustain life for decades to come.”
Shemuel Meir - a former IDF officer - meanwhile says that Gaza is being turned into a flattened wasteland, using bulldozers and booby trapped vehicles, wiping out entire streets as well as houses. He says Israeli citizens aren’t aware of this because it is not reported int he Israeli media - and they are “surprised by the decisions of the International Criminal Court in The Hague”.
Following reports that only 11 out of 109 aid trucks managed to get into Gaza, Shehada notes: “This means 68 grams of food per Gazan In Stalin’s gulag, captives got 950 grams per person".”
And note that even when aid gets in, it is being blocked from getting to civilians, including because the Israeli army is allowing criminal gangs, including blatant collaborators and ISIS linked militants, to steal the aid, whilst killing Palestinian security personnel trying to protect aid.
As UNRWA - the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency and the main humanitarian agency in Gaza, which Israel has sought to destroy - notes:
Hunger in Gaza is at critical levels, with people scavenging through weeks-old waste for scraps of food. As winter approaches, conditions are rapidly deteriorating, and survival is impossible without immediate humanitarian aid..
As the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian affairs further notes, with the onset of heavy rains, 1.6 million people in makeshift shelters urgently need assistance, and of the 41 attempts by the UN to support people besieged in northern Gaza so far in November, 37 were denied altogether, with 4 impeded.
And the survivors are being driven by the Israeli military into the ocean. Gazans have been crammed into increasingly small spaces, specifically the low-lying Al Mawasi area, which are being flooded as sea levels rise, with kill zones on each side if they try and flee. Muhammad Shehada notes that 10,000 tents have been destroyed within 2 days by rain and sea, and 110,000 tents are damaged, worn out and unusable: that is over 80% of tents in Gaza .
Indeed UNICEF have shared grim Palestinian testimonies of sea waves sweeping over tents, and Palestinians freezing as winter approaches.
Once again, there is no excuse for pleading ignorance, for claiming ‘I did not know what was really going on’.
The Israeli state has been extremely and deafeningly clear about its genocidal intentions from day one. Their leaders scream their intentions to the world. And we can see the evidence on the ground as this genocidal plan is implemented. Those who were complicit in this horror have no place to hide.