Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said US envoy Steve Witkoff described Gaza’s entire population as “two million Nazis” during a private meeting last year.
Speaking at a conference in Israel on Thursday, the far-right minister recounted a conversation held after Witkoff’s visited Gaza last August at the height of the Israeli genocide.
Smotrich said: “When Witkoff was appointed, I sat with him and Ron Dermer [former Israeli ambassador to the US].” They showed Witkoff a propaganda video, after which the US envoy turned to Smotrich and reportedly said: “Bezalel, I will not let two million Nazis live next to your children on fences.”
Witkoff, a former property lawyer with no previous foreign policy or humanitarian experience, publicly presented the Gaza visit as an effort to “help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza”.
At the time, Israel was deliberately starving residents by restricting food entering Gaza and driving much of its population towards famine.
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Smotrich also used the conference to call for permanent Israeli territorial expansion in Lebanon.
“There is only one thing that hurts the enemy – land,” said Smotrich. “Whoever messes with us will lose land for ever. A security zone needs to be created for years in Lebanon.”
In the same conference, speaking to the journalist Amit Segal, he said Israel would eventually have to annex Lebanese territory permanently.
The rhetoric mirrors Smotrich’s repeated calls to expel and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza and replace them with Jewish settlers.
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Last December he said: “We cannot live with two million antisemitic Nazis who live off hatred of Israel … That is why we need to encourage their emigration and settle Gaza.”
Months earlier, he said: “He [Trump] supports his own plan of removing the Gazans from Gaza, so our kids won’t have to grow up within a spitting distance from two million Nazis who want to butcher, murder and rape.”
Middle East Eye has reported that the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s office filed a secret application for an arrest warrant against Smotrich over crimes in the occupied West Bank.
The proposed charges include forced displacement, population transfer, persecution and apartheid.
MEE contacted the White House to ask whether Witkoff made the remarks. It had not responded by the time of publication.
