Encouraging voluntary emigration from Gaza is the “most moral and humane thing to do,” Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said in an interview at the JNS International Policy Summit on Sunday night.
This is true of anyone who thinks Palestinians “are human beings and not just as a weapon against Israel,” Sa’ar declared in a conversation with summit chairman Richard D. Heideman.
Arab nations “are trying to deny the rights of the Gazans, their free will or free choice to immigrate,” continued Jerusalem’s top diplomat.
Emigration should be possible under two conditions, he said.
“First, that a certain person or a certain family wants to immigrate from its free will and free choice. They should have been given the same right as any other person on earth, from Syria, from Afghanistan or from any other place. And the second condition should be that there is a state which is really to accept on the other side,” he added.
The Israeli Security Cabinet on March 22 approved Defense Minister Israel Katz’s proposal to establish a directorate within his ministry to facilitate the voluntary emigration of residents from the Strip.
Katz stressed that the initiative aligns with the vision of U.S. President Donald Trump, who is seeking to turn the 25 miles of Gaza’s coastline into a real estate development and relocate some 2.2 million residents.
“We are working with all means to implement the U.S. president’s vision, and we will allow any Gaza resident who wants to move to a third country to do so,” Katz said last month.
Some 36,000 Gazans, or almost 2% of the coastal enclave’s population, have left the Strip since the start of the war prompted by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, Channel 12 News reported on Friday.
Most of the departing Gazans went to Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, countries in Western Europe and Romania, the report said.
A survey published in Britain’s Telegraph last month revealed that 52% of Arabs in Gaza, or more than 1.1 million people, would leave the Strip either temporarily or permanently if given the opportunity.
Israel will not participate in upcoming International Court of Justice hearings regarding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Sa’ar announced.
Sa’ar’s office sent out a statement announcing the decision, and he confirmed it during a Q&A session at the JNS International Policy Summit.
“Instead, Israel’s position on this matter will be delivered tomorrow [April 28] at a press conference at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” the ministry’s statement read.
The U.N.’s top court is set to hear statements by lawyers from more than 40 states arguing that Israel’s ban on all cooperation with UNRWA is a breach of the U.N. Charter.
The five days of hearings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague are expected to focus on whether Israel acted unlawfully when it rescinded the immunities it had afforded to UNRWA.
Sa’ar noted that the ICJ had summoned Israel three times before the current hearings.
“I don’t think there is any precedent for a democratic country, or even a non-democratic country, to be brought to the ICJ,” he said. Israel, he added, “will not take the defendant’s stand” before the United Nations.
Sa’ar accused the Palestinian Authority and its backers of leading the international legal assault against the Jewish state at the ICJ, where Israel is also facing war crimes charges, and the International Criminal Court, where it is facing genocide charges. Israel and the United States, as well as Hungary, rejected these allegations.
“They are trying to minimize our ability to fight in the political battle,” Sa’ar said of the P.A. “For example, they sent the ICJ to deal with the ‘legality of the occupation.’ We say: There is no occupation. It is our land, we cannot occupy that.”
In November, Israel cut all ties with UNRWA operations in Gaza, Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem, in accordance with a law passed after evidence surfaced of Hamas’s infiltration of the aid agency.
In Israel, experts on UNRWA, including former Israeli lawmaker Einat Wilf, dispute claims that Israel’s refusal to work with UNRWA contradicts international law. Israel is not party to any treaty compelling it to engage with the group or allow its activities, Wilf told JNS.
UNRWA provides food, education and medical care to two million people in Gaza. Hundreds of UNRWA workers are believed to have engaged in terrorism in recent years, including on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel. At least one of them was filmed loading the corpse of an Israeli into a vehicle.
According to Israel, more than 450 people belonging to terrorist organizations in Gaza, mainly Hamas, are employed by UNRWA. UNRWA’s chief officer, Philippe Lazzarini, has flatly denied these allegations.
The onslaught of Oct. 7, 2023, in which thousands of Gazan terrorists murdered some 1,200 Israelis and abducted another 251, exposed new levels of complicity by employees of UNRWA.
It led to the passing of laws banning Israeli officials from engaging with UNRWA and banning the agency’s activities in Israel.
Through UNRWA, the United Nations employs a unique refugee definition to Palestinians. UNRWA defines as refugees not only those who fled Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, but also all of their descendants in perpetuity, until a “just solution” emerges for their status. Critics accuse the United Nations of insisting on this definition, preserved through UNRWA, to perpetuate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
