NAZARETH (Palestine Foundation Information Center) The Israeli extremist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich called for conducting ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians in the cities of Jenin and Nablus in the northern occupied West Bank, similar to Israeli military operations in Jabalia camp in the northern Gaza Strip.
Smotrich’s remarks came as he was commenting on the resistance operation which led to the killing of three Israeli settlers and the injury of seven others in a shooting attack carried out near the Kedumim settlement, in which the minister lives, east of Qalqilya.
“Funduk, Nablus, and Jenin should look like Jabaliya” (a neighborhood in Gaza that has been almost completely destroyed), so that Kfar Saba does not become like the Gaza Strip,” he said.
Since last October, Israeli occupation army has been launching a large-scale military operation in the northern Gaza Strip involving intense bombing and suffocating siege, with the aim of forcing the Palestinians to relocate towards the south.
Smotrich demanded an “urgent convening of the cabinet today to discuss a change in concept and the real eradication of terror in Judea and Samaria (the Jewish name for the West Bank).”
The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also responded to the attack in a statement on social media platforms, affirming that all those involved will be brought to account.
For his part, the Israeli army minister, Yisrael Katz, wrote on X, ” We will not accept a Gazan reality in Judea and Samaria, and anyone who follows the path of Hamas in Gaza and enables and sponsors the murder and harm of Jews will pay a heavy price.”
Following the resistance operation, the Israeli occupation army encircled the city of Qalqilya and several towns in northern the West Bank and sent military reinforcements to comb the area in search of the resistance fighters who carried out the attack.
