Idit Silman, the Israeli minister of environmental protection, said on Tuesday that God had sent the Trump administration to advance the goal of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the building of Jewish settlements in the Strip.
According to Haaretz, Silman, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, said the government is “committed to the idea of encouraging emigration” and added that she believes “God has sent us the US administration, and it is clearly telling us – it’s time to inherit the land.”
Silman vowed that Gush Katif, a Jewish settlement in Gaza that was evacuated in 2005, would return. “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,” she said.
Silman said the “only solution for the Gaza Strip is to empty it of Gazans,” an option she said is “realistic.”
Other extremist members of the Netanyahu government have welcomed President Trump’s calls for Palestinians in Gaza to be removed permanently and for the US to take over the Palestinian territory, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who said earlier this week that the plan was “taking shape.”
Smotrich said the Israeli government would establish a new “migration administration” to facilitate the ethnic cleansing. “If we remove 5,000 a day, it will take a year,” he said. “This is a huge logistical operation – not just the bus that takes them, we need to know who is going, to which country, what ages, vocational training, a huge operation, we are preparing.”
Smotrich made the comments after visiting Washington, and he claimed that “sources in the American government” agreed that “it’s impossible for two million people with hatred towards Israel to remain at a stone’s throw from the border.”
