High-ranking far-right minister in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government said today that Gaza cannot survive as an independent entity and that it would be better for the Palestinians there to leave for other countries.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, head of one of the religious nationalist parties in Netanyahu’s coalition, said he supported the view of two members of the Israeli parliament who wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal saying Western countries should accept families from Gaza who have expressed a desire to relocate.

The comments highlight fears in much of the Arab world that Israel wants to evict Palestinians from the land where they want to build a future state, in a repeat of the massive dispossession of Palestinians when the state of Israel was created in 1948.

“I welcome the voluntary migration initiative of Gazan Arabs to countries around the world,” Smotrich said in a statement. “It is the right humanitarian solution for the people of Gaza and for the entire region after 75 years of refugees, poverty and danger.”

He said an area as small as the Gaza Strip without natural resources could not survive on its own, adding: “The State of Israel will no longer be able to accept the existence of an independent entity in Gaza.”

Smotrich made the remarks amid Israel’s ongoing invasion of the Gaza Strip, an Israeli-besieged coastal enclave run by the Islamist group Hamas, home to some 2.3 million people, most of them refugees from previous wars. .

Palestinians and Arab leaders have accused Israel of seeking a new “Nakba” (catastrophe), after the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes after the 1948 war and the establishment of the state of Israel.

Most ended up in neighboring Arab countries, and Arab leaders have said any move today to displace Palestinians would be unacceptable.

Israel launched the Gaza operation in response to an October 7 attack by Hamas gunmen who emerged from the enclave and stormed a string of communities in southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostages who were taken to Gaza, according to Israeli official data. Israeli leaders have vowed to destroy Hamas and rescue the hostages.

At least 11,000 Palestinians have been killed so far in Israel’s shelling of Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities, and entire areas of the enclave have been leveled or reduced to rubble.

The Israeli army has told residents of northern Gaza to leave their homes and head to the southern end of the Strip, where it said they would be safer, and said they would be able to return once the situation stabilises.

Israel withdrew its army and settlers from Gaza in 2005 after 38 years of occupation, and Netanyahu has said he does not intend to maintain a permanent presence again, but that Israel will maintain security control for an indefinite period.

However, there is not much clarity about Israel’s long-term intentions, and countries such as the United States have said that Gaza should be run by the Palestinians.