A relative carries the body of four-year-old Qassim Elwan during his funeral in Gaza City on 19 July. Qassim was killed along with his brother by Israeli shelling the previous day. (Ezz al-Zanoun / APA images)
Israel must attack Gaza even more mercilessly, expel the population and resettle the territory with Jews, the deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, has said.
Moshe Feiglin, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, makes the call in an article for the Israeli news website Arutz Sheva.
Feiglin demands that Israel launch attacks “throughout Gaza with the IDF’s [Israeli army’s] maximum force (and not a tiny fraction of it) with all the conventional means at its disposal.”
Force Gaza population out
“After the IDF completes the ‘softening’ of the targets with its firepower, the IDF will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations,” Feiglin writes in one of several calls for outright war crimes.
Following the reconquest, Israel’s army “will thoroughly eliminate all armed enemies from Gaza. The enemy population that is innocent of wrongdoing and separated itself from the armed terrorists will be treated in accordance with international law and will be allowed to leave,” Feiglin writes.
“Gaza is part of our land”
“Gaza is part of our Land and we will remain there forever,” Feiglin concludes. “Subsequent to the elimination of terror from Gaza, it will become part of sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews. This will also serve to ease the housing crisis in Israel.”
Feiglin has a long history of incitement. Last week he expelled Arab members of the Knesset who dared to criticize Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza and called for Israel to cut off power to dialysis patients there.
As of now, ninety percent of Gaza is without electricity, journalist Mohammed Omer reports, and most Palestinians in Gaza are getting as little as two hours of electricity per day.
Death toll climbs relentlessly
More than 100 Palestinians have been killed in the last 48 hours as Israel continues its indiscriminate attacks on Palestinians throughout the occupied Gaza Strip by land, sea and air.
By Saturday afternoon in Gaza, the thirteenth day of Israel’s current bombardment and invasion of the coastal territory, 339 people, the vast majority civilians, had been killed in total and 2,500 injured.
Tens of thousands have fled their homes, primarily in the north and east of Gaza, seeking shelter from the Israeli assault in United Nations-run schools.
Genocidal demands
Feiglin’s call for the destruction of the Palestinian community in Gaza has some resonance.
Just a day before Feiglin’s article, Rabbi Ben Packer made a similar demand, calling the current assault “an opportunity for Israel to achieve a victory – to move the border” by conquering northern Gaza.
Packer is the director of “Heritage House,” a settlement in occupied East Jerusalem that houses so-called “lone soldiers,” men recruited from overseas to join the Israeli occupation forces.
Israel’s former settlers in Gaza, evacuated in 2005, would be given the first opportunity to “settle in the regained territory,” Packer said.
Packer, a settler from the United States and volunteer in the Israeli army, previously served as the “Rabbi on Campus” at the University of North Carolina and Duke University.
Calls like Feiglin’s and Packer’s for genocidal-scale violence against Palestinians are being heard with ever more frequency from Israeli leaders.
A call for genocide of the Palestinians by Ayelet Shaked, a rising star in Israel’s Habeyit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) party, part of the government, received global notoriety after The Electronic Intifada translated and exposed it earlier this month.
