Two leading Israeli government ministers have brushed aside criticism from the U.S. State Department and doubled down on their push for the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, publicly demanding what they have cynically described as the "voluntary migration" of Palestinians out of the besieged enclave and the return of Jewish settlements that were removed nearly two decades ago.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's finance minister, claimed Wednesday that the mass expulsion of Gazans would be a "humanitarian solution" and declared that "a small country like ours cannot afford a reality where, four minutes away from our settlements, there is a hotbed of hatred and terror, where there are two million people who wake up every morning with the desire to destroy the state of Israel."
