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Netanyahu after using US pier to push Palestinians out of Gaza: Report

Wednesday, 20 March 2024 6:42 PM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 20 March 2024 6:45 PM ]

(Background) Displaced Palestinians walk along the seashore at the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, March 18, 2024. (Original photo by AFP)

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu considers using a floating pier on the Gaza coast being constructed by the United States to push the Palestinians out of their homeland, a report says.

US President Joe Biden said earlier this month that the US military will construct a port off Gaza to get more humanitarian aid into the besieged territory by sea.

The Pentagon is sill developing the temporary port off Gaza’s coast.

According to officials, the port will increase the amount of humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians by “hundreds of additional truckloads” per day.

But Netanyahu told a private meeting of the parliament, known as the Knesset, that the port could facilitate the removal of Palestinians from Gaza, Israel’s Kan News reported.

He said there was “no obstacle” to the Palestinians leaving Gaza apart from the unwillingness of other countries to accept them, the report said.

US Army ships have sailed from Virginia with equipment to build the pier, the Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Major General Pat Ryder said on March 12.

Netanyahu’s flagrant remarks have sparked serious reactions from the Palestinians.

Mustafa Barghouti, leader of the Palestinian National Initiative, said in a message on X that Netanyahu “never gave up his dream of a complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.”

If US can build military base off Gaza shore, Axis of Resistance can also sink it

According to the Pentagon, the plan to build the floating military port will take up to 60 days, with more than 1,000 American troops will be engaged in the ambitious project.

A week after Israel launched its bloodiest ever campaign in Gaza in early October, the regime issued a secret ten-page document — leaked to the internet — outlining the expulsion of the Palestinian population of Gaza to northern Sinai, Egypt.

The revelation was followed by remarks made by Israel’s far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich, who called for the people of Gaza to voluntarily leave their homeland and migrate to Western countries.

Smotrich’s plan for “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza’s 2.3 million population raised fears of yet another “Nakba” or “catastrophe,” which refers to the occupying regime’s violent expulsion of about 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland when it proclaimed its illegal advent on May 15, 1948.

The Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated places in the world, has been under relentless air and ground strikes by Israel since early October. A staggering 85 percent of the total population — 1.9 million civilians — have been forcibly displaced.

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