Jordan and a UN agency for Palestinian refugees have accused Israel of intending to “cleanse” Gaza of Palestinians. Source: Wafa, Wikimedia Commons
Jordan and the United Nations Agency for Palestinian refugees have accused Israel of planning to cleanse Gaza of its population through their “indiscriminate and brutal offensive” over the past three months.
Jordan’s Foreign Minister, Ayman Safadi, said at the Doha Forum on Sunday that Israel is implementing a policy of forcibly pushing the Palestinians out of Gaza through a war he said meets the “legal definition of genocide.”
“What we are seeing in Gaza is not just simply the killing of innocent people and the destruction of their livelihoods, but a systematic effort to empty Gaza of its people,” Safadi said.
“We have not seen the world yet come to the place we should come to … an unequivocal demand for ending this war, a war that is within the legal definition of genocide.”
Safadi also argued that the magnitude of destruction and civilian death in Gaza contradicts Israel’s stated goal of “destroying Hamas.”
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), also accused Israel of aiming to cleanse Gaza of its population through a mass expulsion of civilians into Egypt.
“The United Nations and several member states, including the United States, have firmly rejected forcibly displacing Gazans out of the Gaza Strip,” Lazzarini said at the Doha Forum.
“But the developments we are witnessing point to attempts to move Palestinians into Egypt, regardless of whether they stay there or are resettled elsewhere.”
Lazzarini said the widespread destruction of the Palestinian territories in the north and the mass displacements that followed were “the first stage of such a scenario”, and that pushing civilians from Khan Younis towards the Egyptian border was the next stage.
Many, including Palestinian journalists currently in Gaza, are calling the current war on Gaza a ‘second Nakba’ – which refers to the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel, where the Israeli occupation forcibly displaced 760,000 Palestinians and killed around 15,000.
The death toll from Israel’s current three-month-long assault on Gaza has now surpassed the 1948 Nakba, with well over 17,000 civilians killed, and Gazan journalists reporting an even higher number of over 20,000.
Over half of those killed are women and children.
