TEHRAN - Moshe Ya’alon, the former Israeli defense minister, said on Saturday that the leadership in Israel, driven by far-right elements who seek to resettle Gaza, was taking the country down a path of ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip.

He specified that the military was already cleansing parts of Gaza of Palestinians while warning that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was leading Israel to “destruction”.

“The path we are being dragged down is one of occupation, annexation and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip,” Ya’alon told Democrat TV.

The comments by Ya’alon are not surprising. What is surprising is that such a statement is made by a person who served as defense minister under Netanyahu from 2013-2016. Independent analysts have been warning that so much destruction, amazing brutal acts, and starvation are intended to depopulate Gaza from the Palestinians. Even common people believe that Israel is seeking to force Palestinians to leave Gaza.

Analysts also believe Israel is not just seeking to resettle Gaza but to force Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to abandon their native homeland.

Speaking at the annual UN meeting in New York, Netanyahu claimed that Israel does not seek to stay in the Gaza Strip. If it is so, why has his military flattened about 60-70 of the buildings in the besieged Gaza Strip? The scale of destruction in such a small territory housing about 2.3 million population is so great that has made living there almost impossible.

In mid-July, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), citing the UN Environment Program (UNEP), estimated that clearing 40 million tons of rubble in the Strip will take 15 years.

The scale of destruction and death in Gaza convinces everybody with common sense that hawkish politicians want to ethnically cleanse Palestine's indigenous people. Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told Army Radio on Sunday that “settlement in Gaza should be encouraged”.

However, what is shocking is that the United States has angrily rejected reports by UN officials that Israel is ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population in Gaza and has threatened to take punitive measures against The Hague-based International Criminal Court that has issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his sacked defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and Crimes against humanity in Gaza.

And what is more astounding and dangerous is that Republican Tom Cotton has suggested that the United States could invade Holland to protect wanted Israeli war criminals.

“The ICC is a kangaroo court and Karim Khan is a deranged fanatic. Woe to him and anyone who tries to enforce these outlaw warrants. Let me give them all a friendly reminder: the American law on the ICC is known as The Hague Invasion Act for a reason. Think about it,” Cotton wrote in a post on X on Nov. 21.

Remarks by American officials in making threats against the ICC and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) are worrying signs that the world is unfortunately degenerating into lawlessness, chaos, fanaticism, and fascism. In such an environment people in certain parts of the world have the right to feel unsafe and unprotected.

Mandy Turner, a British senior researcher with Security in Context, is quite right when she says the US is “directly militarily involved in Israel's genocide in Gaza” and “shielding it from censure” in the UN, the ICC, and ICJ.

Naturally, a complicit in the genocide resorts to different pretexts and event threats to deny and undeniable fact before the eyes of the people in the world.