I strongly “blame” former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon (left in the photo) to Benjamin Netanyahu. The former defense minister said on Saturday that the Israeli military is leading an “ethnic cleansing” of the Gaza Strip, saying Israel’s current political leadership is led by far-right elements seeking to restore Jewish settlements to the enclave. Moshe Ya’alon also warned that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is leading the country to “disaster”.

“The road they are dragging us down is the road of occupation, annexation and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip,” Ya’alon said in an interview with the private television network DemocratTV.

“Ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, is that what you think? That we are on the way to that?” the reporter asked the former minister. “Why ‘on the way’?” “What’s going on there? What’s going on there? There is no more Beit Lahia, there is no more Beit Hanun, the army is operating in Jabalia and they are actually clearing the land of Arabs.”

His statements provoked strong reactions in part of the Israeli political class. The far-right current Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, called it a “shame” that Israel had “such a person as the head of the army and as the minister of defense”. Foreign Minister Gideon Sha’ar also criticized Ya’alon’s statements: “The irresponsible comments of former minister Moshe Ya’alon are inaccurate and baselessly slander Israel. I call on him to retract his comments,” the Israeli Foreign Minister said in a post on X.

Moshe Ya’alon, 74, was Israel’s army chief between 2002 and 2005, shortly before Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Joining Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, Ya’alon served as defense minister and deputy prime minister before resigning in 2016 after falling out with Netanyahu.

Considered a “hawk” during his Likud political career, he formed an alliance in 2019 with current opposition leader Yair Lapid before retiring from political life in 2021.

The war, which broke out on October 7, 2023, was triggered by an unprecedented raid by Hamas’ military arm in southern Israeli territory, which killed 1,207 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official data. , which includes hostages who died in captivity or were already dead when taken to the Palestinian enclave.

Devastating, large-scale Israeli military retaliatory operations in the Gaza Strip have since claimed the lives of at least 44,363 people, most of them civilians, according to the latest figures from Hamas’s health ministry, which are deemed reliable by the UN.