Speaking at the Doha Forum, Ayman Safadi said the Israeli operation in Gaza meets the “legal definition of genocide.”
Jordan and the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees have accused Israel of wanting to cleanse Gaza of its population with a “blind and brutal offensive” in response to the Hamas attack on October 7.
Speaking at the Doha Forum held in the Qatari capital on Sunday, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said Israel was implementing a policy to drive Palestinians out of Gaza through a war which, according to him, meets the “legal definition of genocide”.
“What we are seeing in Gaza is not just the killing of innocent people and the destruction of their livelihoods, but also a systematic effort to empty Gaza of its population,” Safadi said.
“We have not yet seen the world get to the point where we should get to…an unequivocal demand to end this war, a war that falls within the legal definition of genocide.” »
Safadi argued that Israel’s stated goal of destroying Hamas was belied by the scale of destruction among Gaza’s civilians, which he called “indiscriminate.”
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), also accused Israel of planning a mass expulsion of people from Gaza to Egypt.
“The United Nations and several member states, including the United States, have strongly rejected the forced displacement of Gazans from the Gaza Strip,” Lazzarini said in his speech at the Doha Forum.
This is recognition of the life-saving work of our @UNRWA teams.
This is not the time to celebrate, however, as UNRWA mourns the 134 colleagues killed in the brutal war in #Gazabut a moment to pay homage. pic.twitter.com/NwWNgqefiR
– Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) December 10, 2023
“But the developments we are seeing demonstrate attempts to move Palestinians to Egypt, whether they remain there or are resettled elsewhere. »
Lazzarini said the widespread destruction in the north of the Palestinian territory and the resulting displacements were “the first step in such a scenario,” adding that forcing civilians in the southern town of Khan Younis to move closer to the border Egyptian was the next step.
“If this path continues, leading to what many are already calling a second Nakba, Gaza will no longer be a land for Palestinians,” Lazzarini said, using the Arabic term for the exodus or forced displacement of 760,000 Palestinians in during a war which coincided with the war. with the creation of Israel in 1948.
The Israeli government has rejected the accusations, with its spokesperson Eylon Levy calling them “scandalous and false”.
“Israel is fighting to defend itself against the monsters who carried out the October 7 massacre, and the goal of our campaign is to bring these monsters to justice and ensure that they never harm our people again,” he said. he declares.
Levy said Israel had urged civilians in Gaza to leave the battlefields for their own safety and would like to see other countries echo that call.
A spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Ministry also responded to the UNRWA chief’s statements by saying: “There is not, there has never been and there will never be an Israeli project aimed at to move the inhabitants of Gaza to Egypt. This is simply not true.
However, in recent months, several Israeli ministers have publicly made comments suggesting that the Israeli operation was aimed at driving Palestinians out of Gaza.
Israeli Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel said last month that “one option” after the war could be “to promote the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons, outside the Strip.”
And former Israeli officials have suggested in television interviews that Egypt could build vast tent cities in the Sinai desert, with international funding, for displaced Palestinians.