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, reported AFP. "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 Hamas's attack on Israel 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.
