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Killing two million by hunger in Gaza ‘justified, moral’: Israeli minister

Monday, 05 August 2024 1:46 PM [ Last Update: Monday, 05 August 2024 2:11 PM ]

Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (Photo via social media)

Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says he believes blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is “justified and moral” even if it causes two million civilians to die of hunger in the coastal Palestinian territory.

“We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our captives are returned,” Smotrich said at a conference in the central Israeli city of Yad Binyamin hosted by the Hebrew-language daily newspaper Israel Hayom.

The Israeli individual reiterated his opposition to any prisoner swap deal with Hamas, claiming that current ceasefire proposals are “unjust and unethical” as they would only return a few hostages and jeopardize Israel’s security.

Smotrich also expressed his opposition to releasing Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Israeli captives, asserting that they would “return to kill Jews.”

He said Israel must regain full control over what exactly enters the Gaza Strip, asserting he opposes the stance of the Israeli army and minister of military affairs Yoav Gallant on the matter.

“I don’t know if the prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] doesn’t want or isn’t managing to rein them in,” Smotrich said.

Israeli strikes on Gaza schools ‘continuation of Nazi-like genocide’, says Hamas

The Palestinian Hamas resistance movement has vehemently denounced Israeli strikes on schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza as a continuation of the regime’s “Nazi-like genocide.”

The far-right Israeli minister also claimed that if Israel hadn’t pulled out of Gaza in 2005 and continued construction of illegal settlements within the Gaza Strip, the large-scale and surprise Operation al-Aqsa Storm launched by Gaza-based Palestinian resistance groups on October 7 last year would not have happened.

Concomitantly with the Gaza war, Israel has been enforcing a near-total siege on the coastal territory, which has reduced the flow of foodstuffs, medicine, electricity, and water into the Palestinian territory into a trickle.

Since October, the occupying regime has killed at least 39,600 Gazans, most of them women, children, and adolescents.

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