Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said on Saturday that the Israeli army was carrying out “ethnic cleansing” in the Gaza Strip, provoking an outcry within the political class.
“The road we are being led on is conquest, annexation and ethnic cleansing,” he said in an interview on the private channel DemocratTV. He added, echoed by the journalist: “What is happening there? There is no more Beit Lahia, no more Beit Hanoun, the army intervenes in Jabalia and in reality we clear the land of the Arabs.
Reactions abounded, with the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, describing it as a “shame” that Israel had “such a character as head of the army and minister of Defense”.
Moshe Ya’alon, 74, was the head of the Israeli army between 2002 and 2005, just before Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Joining Likud, the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he was Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister, before resigning in 2016, following differences with Netanyahu.
Considered a hawk during his political career within Likud, he allied himself in 2019 with the current leader of the opposition Yaïr Lapid before retiring from political life in 2021.
Customary with shock phrases, he had recently supported the soldiers who had threatened not to report to the army as reservists, saying that if he “had been an officer in Hitler’s army”, he would have refused to do certain things, while adding that he “did not compare” with the situation in Israel.
Related News :