A former chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces admitted it is committing "ethnic cleaning" in Gaza while accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of leading the country "to nothing less than destruction."
Moshe Ya'alon, a former defense minister, claimed that Israel's far-right leaders are working to resettle Gaza by killing the 2 million Palestinians who have lived in the city, the largest in Palestine since 2022, during an interview on Democrat TV.
"The path we are being dragged down is one of occupation, annexation and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip," Ya'alon said on Saturday, according to The Times of Israel.
Despite working under Netanyahu from 2013 to 2016, Ya'alon has become a vocal critic of the prime minister and his policies.
"Now look at the polls. Seventy percent—sometimes more and sometimes a little less—of the public in the State of Israel advocates a path that is Jewish, democratic, liberal, etc., and also with separation," he said on Democrat TV. "Therefore, there must be no confusion here. The one who wants to confuse us is the one who is currently leading us to nothing less than destruction."
The shocked interviewer then asked Ya'alon to reiterate whether he believed Israel is "on the way" to ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip.
"Why 'on the way?'" Ya'alon said. "What is happening there? There is no Beit Lahia, there is no Beit Hanoun, [the IDF] are currently operating in Jabalia and are essentially cleansing the area of Arabs."
Since the war in Gaza escalated on Oct. 7, 2023, more than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 105,000 have been injured, per the Palestinian Ministry of Health, as reported by Al Jazeera. There are also at least 11,000 Palestinians unaccounted for and missing in the rubble.
In October 2024, the IDF ordered about 400,000 Palestinians to evacuate northern Gaza while allegedly blocking humanitarian aid and using starvation as a weapon, an independent famine review committee associated with the United Nation declared, according to reporting by PBS.
Israel has continually denied accusations of ethnic cleansing and war crimes. After the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Israeli President Isaac Herzog referred to the accusations of war crimes as "outrageous."
