The Israeli former defense minister Moshe Ya’aloun told the Israeli radio that Israel is conducting an ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
Ya’alon said that “the army is committing war crimes” in the Gaza Strip and “is trying to hide them,” stressing that he bears responsibility for his previous statements regarding his country’s army committing “ethnic cleansing crimes” in the northern Gaza Strip.
This came in an interview conducted by the Israeli Public Radio on Sunday with Ya’alon, the day after he confirmed that the “army” was committing ethnic cleansing in the northern Gaza Strip.
Ya’alon said: “I bear responsibility for what I said about carrying out ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza.”
On Saturday, in an unprecedented statement by a former official of Ya’alon’s stature, in an interview with the local Israeli channel /democratv/, excerpts of which were republished by the official broadcasting authority, he said that “Israel” is carrying out “ethnic cleansing” in the northern Gaza Strip, accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of leading the entity to “ruin.”
Ya’alon added in an interview today: “I speak on behalf of the leaders serving in northern Gaza, there are war crimes being committed there.”
He continued: “Israeli soldiers are putting their lives at risk and will be subject to lawsuits in the International Criminal Court.”
He continued: “I must warn about what is happening there (in northern Gaza) and they are trying to hide it from us, as they are committing war crimes there.”
Regarding Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s call to displace the residents of the Gaza Strip, Ya’alon said: “Smotrich is proud of the opportunity to reduce the population of Gaza by half.”
He went on to ask: “What do you call that? He has no moral problem with killing two million Gazans, we were a democratic country.”
Last November, Smotrich called for reoccupying the Gaza Strip and reducing the number of Palestinians there by half by encouraging what he called voluntary migration.
Regarding the policy of the right-wing Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Ya’alon said: “We are now being dragged into occupation, annexation, ethnic cleansing – look at the northern Gaza Strip – displacement, and Jewish settlement.”
Ya’alon, who served as Minister of Defense between 2013-2016, accused Benjamin Netanyahu in the same interview of leading “Israel towards ruin.”
The Israeli occupation army, supported by the United States and Europe, continues its aggression on the Gaza Strip for the second year, where its aircraft bomb the vicinity of hospitals, buildings, towers and homes of Palestinian civilians, destroying them over the heads of their inhabitants, and preventing the entry of water, food, medicine and fuel.
The aggression left about 149,000 Palestinian martyrs and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 10,000 missing, amid massive destruction and famine that killed dozens of children and elderly people, in one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world according to Jo24.