Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates condemned today the statements of two Israeli ministers calling on the Palestinians to leave the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir called on Monday for Jewish settlers to return to Gaza after the war raging in the Palestinian enclave and for the Palestinian people to be “encouraged” to immigrate, a day after his far-right colleague and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich made a similar call.

The kingdom “categorically condemns and rejects the comments of the two ministers,” the Saudi Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

He called on the international community to act against the Israeli government’s “persistence” in violating international law “through its statements and its actions.”

Qatar, which played a mediating role in the truce between Israel and Palestinian Hamas in late November, “condemned in the strongest possible terms” the two ministers’ statements. “The policy of collective punishment and forced displacement applied by the occupying authorities against the people of Gaza will not change the fact that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian,” the foreign ministry added in a statement.

Similar to its Gulf neighbors was the reaction of Kuwait, which warned of “Israeli plans aimed at displacing the residents of Gaza in particular and the Palestinian people in general.”

The United Arab Emirates, which normalized relations with Israel in 2020, also denounced “in the strongest terms the extremist statements” of the two ministers.

The UAE foreign minister “expresses his categorical rejection of these offensive statements and all practices that threaten to further exacerbate escalation and instability in the region,” he said in a statement.

The statements of the two Israeli ministers were also denounced by the United States, France and the European Union.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, an alliance of right-wing, far-right parties and ultra-Orthodox Jewish formations, is already accused of greatly strengthening settler influence in the West Bank, Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967.