Israeli Minister Amichai Eliyahu: Gaza will be ‘wiped out’ and will become totally Jewish

Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu.
Photo: ‘The Times of Israel’

Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that Israel was working to “wipe out” the Gaza Strip and called for the Palestinian territory to be settled by Jews, saying it will become totally Jewish.

“The government is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu said in a radio interview, according to The Times of Israel. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil.”

The minister, who is a member of Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power party, said that Gaza will be cleared for Jewish settlements, but said that Jewish towns wouldn’t be “fenced in inside cantons.”

“All Gaza will be Jewish,” he said. According to the Times, Eliyahu said Arabs who are loyal to the state of Israel could be tolerated, but it’s unclear what that means.

The Israeli minister also denied that there was “hunger” inside Gaza, even though people have begun starving to death every day. “There’s no hunger in Gaza,” he said.

Parents are boiling tree leaves to feed their children.
Photo: WFP – World Food Programme

‘Parents are boiling tree leaves to feed their children,’ – writes London press.

More than 100 aid groups called out the mass starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza by the Israelis.

The groups, which include Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and Oxfam, say “mass starvation” is spreading across Gaza and that their colleagues in the enclave are wasting away from hunger.

In a joint statement the groups said: “Doctors report record rates of acute malnutrition, especially among children and older people.

“Illnesses like acute watery diarrhoea are spreading, markets are empty, waste is piling up, and adults are collapsing on the streets from hunger and dehydration.

“Distributions in Gaza average just 28 trucks a day, far from enough for over two million people, many of whom have gone weeks without assistance.”

The groups said the UN-led humanitarian system has not failed, “it has been prevented from functioning.”

The NGOs said it was time that governments from across the world must “take decisive action, demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire,” and open all land crossings.

Bushra Khalidi, policy lead in the occupied Palestinian territory for Oxfam, says the global aid organisation’s staff are “risking being shot” by standing in food lines in Gaza.

Ms Khalidi said: “My colleague told me on Saturday that she went to work without even water, she ate a single falafel just to keep going, and she still showed up to work.”

She said: “We’ve heard from parents boiling tree leaves to feed their children, from aid workers who burned their own clothes to cook the last scraps of lentils that they have, from mothers that we’ve met saying my son died from hunger, literally in front of my eyes because his body couldn’t take it any more.”

Ms Khalidi added: “This is not a humanitarian failure. This is a deliberate policy, and aid is being blocked. People are being starved.”

The UN World Food Programme says Gaza’s hunger crisis has reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation.” Ross Smith, the agency’s director for emergencies, told reporters on Monday that nearly 100,000 women and children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition, and a third of Gaza’s population is going without food for multiple days in a row.

Joseph Belliveau, the executive director of MedGlobal, a charity working in Gaza, said: “This is a deliberate and human-made disaster.

“Those children died because there is not enough food in Gaza and not enough medicines, including IV fluids and therapeutic formula, to revive them.”

…International views of Israel are much more negative than positive, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 24 countries conducted this spring.

Israelis, for their part, tend to say their country is not respected internationally: 58% say Israel is not too or not at all respected around the world, while 39% think it is: