OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel's far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich called on Sunday for the annexation of areas of south Lebanon and the Gaza Strip currently under Israeli military control and for Israeli forces to "go to war" against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

 

"I would like us to annex at least as far as the Yellow Line in Gaza [which demarcates the areas under Hamas and Israeli control] and as far as the Litani River in Lebanon... because if a war ends along the same lines where it began, what will deter the enemy from going to war again," Smotrich said in a podcast for Israeli news site Ynet.

 

"I think we need to go to war in Judea and Samaria, to dismantle the Palestinian Authority that supports terror," he added, using the biblical term for the West Bank.

 

Smotrich is the leader of a far-right party that advocates the annexation of the entire West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since 1967.

 

The West Bank has seen a surge in violence since the outbreak of war in the Gaza Strip following the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023.

 

More than 500,000 Israelis live in West Bank settlements, which are illegal under international law, in the Palestinian territory among some three million Palestinians.

 

Far-right Israeli ministers have offered timelines and mechanisms to forcefully displace Palestinians from Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

 

Israeli defence minister Israel Katz has recently told a conference that removing Palestinians from Gaza is “the only solution”, saying Israel is prepared to do it “by sea, by air and by every way possible”, and that US President Donald Trump has merely “frozen” – not cancelled – his support for the idea.

 

National security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has also unveiled a seven-year plan, dubbed “Disengagement 710”, to remove Gaza’s roughly two million residents through “voluntary emigration”.

 

Ben-Gvir said that, if re-elected, he would establish a migration ministry to expel Palestinians.

 

The US State Department said it “does not support any plan or proposal for the forced displacement, expulsion, or mandatory transfer of the population of Gaza.”

 

The Palestinian death toll from the nearly three-year Israel-Hamas war has surpassed 74,000, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

 

Gaza’s Health Ministry said that the Palestinian death toll has risen to 74,016, with 175,068 wounded.

 

While a ceasefire that took effect last October 10 has halted the heaviest fighting, Israeli strikes have continued in what the military has said are responses to threats or attacks.

 

Since the ceasefire, 1,145 Palestinians have been killed, said the ministry.