Far-right Israeli minister calls for 'voluntary migration' of Palestinians

Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Tuesday he backs a proposal by Knesset members Ram Ben Barak and Danny Danon for the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians.

In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Barak and Danan had called for “countries of the world” to accept an influx of refugees from Gaza. 

The finance minister and de facto governor of the occupied West Bank hailed the proposition as the “only solution” for the 2.3 million population of the besieged strip, who have become “a symbol of the ambition of exterminating the state of Israel”.

“The majority of Gaza's population is the fourth and fifth generation of the '48 refugees,” Smotrich wrote in a Facebook post, referring to the Nakba in 1948, when Zionist militias forcibly expelled more than 700,000 Palestinians from historic Palestine and prohibited them and their descendants from ever returning.

“Who instead of being rehabilitated … like hundreds of millions of refugees around the world, were held hostages in Gaza in poverty.”

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