Children in Gaza, February 2025. Photo: Palestine News & Information Agency, WAFA.
By Ben Norton – May 29, 2025
A poll found that 82% of full citizens of Israel want to expel Palestinians from Gaza. 47% want to kill every single man, woman, and child in Gaza. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote that Israel is waging a “war of extermination: the indiscriminate, unrestrained, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians”.
Support for genocide, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing is widespread in Israel.
Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert admitted that his country is waging a “war of extermination: the indiscriminate, unrestrained, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians”.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Israelis want to expel Palestinians from Gaza, and roughly half want to kill every single man, woman, and child in the besieged strip.
This is according to a poll that was published by the major Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
It found that 82% of Israelis want to expel Gazans, and 47% support killing all Palestinians in Gaza.
The more religious an Israeli is, the more likely they are to support genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The survey was conducted in March by Israeli scholar Tamir Sorek, a professor at Pennsylvania State University. He worked with the Israeli polling firm Geocartography Knowledge Group.
A March 2025 poll of Israeli public opinion, commissioned by Pennsylvania State University and published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz
Most Israelis want to expel Palestinian citizens
Roughly 21% of citizens of Israel are Palestinians, although they are not considered to be fully Israeli. They are third-class citizens, and are denied equal treatment by the Israeli regime.
“Israel is not a state of all its citizens”, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared with pride in 2019.
“According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it”, Netanyahu stressed, making it clear that Palestinians are not truly considered to be Israelis.
The March 2025 poll commissioned by Pennsylvania State University found that 56% of Jewish Israelis — who are the only ones considered to be true, full citizens — want to expel all Palestinian citizens. This includes 66% of Israelis under the age 40.
The younger an Israeli is, the more likely they are to be a far-right extremist, the survey showed.
US Protects Israel as Netanyahu Vows To ‘Take Over’ Gaza, Using Hunger as a Weapon
How the political systems of Israel and the USA promote far-right extremism
Professor Tamir Sorek, the Israeli scholar who conducted the poll, noted that some prominent religious leaders in Israel have advocated for the mass murder of Palestinian civilians.
As an example, Sorek cited Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, an influential Israeli settler leader in the West Bank, which according to international law is Palestinian territory that has been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967.
Ginsburgh, who wants to eliminate Palestinians and establish a theocratic monarchy in Israel, is also an American. He was born and raised in the United States, and did not move to Israel until he was in his 20s.
Sorek wrote that the attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 “only unleashed demons that had been nurtured for decades in the media and the legal and educational systems”.
In Haaretz, Sorek wrote (emphasis added):
Zionism, besides being a national movement, is also a movement of immigrant-settlers, seeking to displace the local population. Settler-immigrant societies always encounter indiscriminate violent resistance from indigenous groups. The desire for absolute and permanent security can lead to an aspiration to eliminate the resisting population. Therefore, virtually every settlement project has the potential for ethnic cleansing and genocide, as indeed happened in North America in the 17th through 19th centuries or in Namibia in the early 1900s.
Sorek warned in another article in April that, “In Israel, calls for genocide have migrated from the margins to the mainstream”.
A clear example of how fascism has become mainstream in Israel is the country’s extreme-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the government’s powerful security cabinet.
Smotrich described himself as a “fascist homophobe”. The top Israeli official has called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza, and he argued it would be “justified and moral” to starve to death all 2.1 million Palestinians in the strip.
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says Israel is waging a “war of extermination” in Gaza
Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has accused his country of committing war crimes and waging a “war of extermination” in Gaza.
Olmert led the Israeli regime from 2006 to 2009. He was previously a decades-long member of Netanyahu’s right-wing political party, Likud.
He made these frank admissions in a Hebrew-language article in Haaretz in May. (The following quotes are from Google Translate.)
“What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: the indiscriminate, unrestrained, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians”, Olmert stated.
He made it clear that this is the “result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, viciously, maliciously, recklessly”.
Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert with US President George W. Bush in the White House in 2006
Olmert explained that, in 2023 and 2024, he denied that the Israeli regime was intentionally committing war crimes, but he now realizes that he was wrong.
“There are too many cases of brutal shooting of civilians, of destruction of property and homes”, the former Israeli prime minister said. “Looting of property, thefts from homes, which in many cases IDF soldiers have also taken pride in and published in personal posts. We are committing war crimes”.
Olmert stated in no uncertain terms that Israel is using hunger as a weapons: “Yes, we are depriving the residents of Gaza of food, medicine, and minimal means of subsistence as part of a declared policy”.
He referred to the Israeli regime as a “gang of criminals”, and wrote that “the ministers of the Israeli government, led by the head of the gang, Netanyahu, are actually adopting, without forethought, without hesitation, a policy of starvation and humanitarian pressure whose outcome could be catastrophic”.
Israel officially calls its war in Gaza “Operation Gideon’s Chariots”. Olmert said this is an “illegitimate military campaign”, in which Israeli soldiers have gone on a “rampage”, and have turned Gaza into a “humanitarian disaster zone”.
The army is acting “recklessly, carelessly, and excessively aggressively”, he added.
The large number of Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza is “unreasonable, unjustifiable, unacceptable”, he wrote.
Olmert also admitted that Israelis “massacre Palestinian civilians in the West Bank as well”, and “commit heinous crimes every day in the West Bank”.
In an interview with ABC News, the former Israeli prime minister acknowledged, “We have destroyed Gaza”.
Ben Norton
Benjamin Norton is the founder and editor of the independent news website Multipolarista, where he does original reporting in both English and Spanish. Benjamin has reported from numerous countries, including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Colombia, and more. His journalistic work has been published in dozens of media outlets, and he has done interviews on Sky News, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, El Financiero Bloomberg, Al Mayadeen teleSUR, RT, TRT World, CGTN, Press TV, HispanTV, Sin Censura, and various TV channels in Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Benjamin writes a regular column for Al Mayadeen (in English and Spanish). He was formerly a reporter with the investigative journalism website The Grayzone, and previously produced the political podcast and video show Moderate Rebels. His personal website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
