‘Can Gaza be thrown in the sea?’ asks Israeli politician

The chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee in the Israeli parliament has asked if the Gaza Strip can be “thrown in the sea,” Shehab news agency reported on Monday. His question echoes that of the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Avi Dichter made his comment on Israel’s Channel 2 TV. “In 1992, before Oslo, there was a bloody wave of attacks from and in Gaza,” he explained. “At one of the meetings, Rabin entered and suddenly asked: ‘Let me know, can the Gaza Strip be cut with a saw and thrown in the sea?’”

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According to Dichter, Rabin was serious when he asked the question, and his staff did not know how to answer him. “All of them looked at me because I was the Shabak [internal security agency] chief in Gaza and I said: ‘Mr Prime Minister, we are working on this.’”

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Gaza was really a very big problem, he added. “Currently, we are in a completely different age. Gaza is a treacherous and bad geographic region. Simply, it is very dangerous to Israel.”