Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has called for the assassination of Palestinian Authority (PA) officials if the United Nations endorses a plan on postwar management of the Gaza Strip that mentions Palestinian statehood.
Ben-Gvir made the remarks at a meeting of his extremist Otzma Yehudit party on Monday, hours before a UN Security Council vote on the US-drafted Gaza resolution.
The draft resolution states that conditions may be in place for “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” while “Gaza re-development advances and when the PA reform program is faithfully carried out.”
Ben-Gvir called top PA officials “terrorists” and insisted that a Palestinian state must never be established.
“If they accelerate the recognition of the Palestinian … state, and the UN recognizes a Palestinian state, targeted assassinations of senior Palestinian Authority officials… should be ordered,” he added.
Ben-Gvir also said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas should be arrested if the UN vote takes the idea of Palestinian statehood forward, noting that a solitary confinement cell is “ready for him” at the Israeli Ketziot prison.
The draft resolution would follow up on the ceasefire deal between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas resistance group, which took effect on October 10 and brought an end to Israel’s two-year-long genocidal war on Gaza.
The proposal also lays out a multi-stage process that would hand Gaza over to an international stabilization force to oversee the disarmament of Hamas.
Additionally, it will place Gaza under the authority of a technocratic Palestinian administration answering ultimately to the so-called “board of peace” chaired by the US President Donald Trump.
Hamas and other Palestinian factions rejected the “dangerous” resolution submitted by the US to the UN Security Council as “an attempt to subject the Gaza Strip to international authority.”
In a statement, they dismissed any foreign military presence inside the Gaza Strip and any clause relating to the disarmament or harming “the Palestinian people’s right to resistance.”
The wording of the resolution “paves the way for external domination over Palestinian national decision-making by transferring the administration of Gaza and reconstruction to an international, supranational entity with broad powers, thereby stripping Palestinians of their right to manage their own affairs.”
Speaking on Saturday, Ben-Gvir alleged that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” and that Palestinians are a “collection of immigrants from Arab countries.”
Israel unleashed its genocidal war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, but it failed to achieve its declared objectives despite killing at least 69,483 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring 170,706 others.
The Gaza genocide mounted calls worldwide for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.
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