Benjamin Netanyahu says he is personally working on getting countries to take the people of Gaza. "You want to leave. Leave. And we need to allow them," he told Arutz Sheva in an interview released on Thursday, five days before Israel's election. "It's complicated because the problem is not on our side. The problem is the receiving countries. We're working on that too. I'm working on it a lot. There are beginnings. I don't want to go into detail." Some 150,000 people have already left, he said.

Israel calls this voluntary emigration. The people it is talking about live in a strip Israel has bombed to rubble over three years of genocide, and more than 60 per cent of which, in Netanyahu's own words in the same interview, Israel now controls. Moving a population out of occupied territory, by force or by making it unliveable, is forcible transfer, a war crime under international law.

In the same interview Netanyahu said there "won't be any alternative" to the Israeli army going back in to "finish" Hamas. He has said this before. In 2025 Israel's Mossad asked African countries to take Palestinians from Gaza, and Netanyahu said Israel was "talking to several countries". A senior Israeli official named South Sudan, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Libya and Indonesia. South Sudan called the reports baseless. In June this year Netanyahu said "voluntary migration" was still on the table.

Netanyahu calls it leaving. Pushing a people out of their land by making it impossible to live on, then paying other countries to take them, has another name.