Poll: Overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis back expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza

The New Arab Staff
May 24, 2025

Some 82% of Israelis support the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, according to a poll commissioned by Penn State University.

An overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, aligning with the extremist Netanyahu government that has vowed to drive the Palestinians from their land.

An online poll of more than 1,000 people found that 82% back the forced deportation of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents.

The survey was conducted in the first week of March by Israeli polling firm Geocartography on behalf of Penn State University.

The poll also indicated high levels of hostility towards Arab Israelis, with more than half (56%) of respondents voicing support for the deportation of the 2 million Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship.

Even more alarmingly, a significant number of people expressed support for committing genocide against the Palestinians, with almost half of those surveyed agreeing that the Israeli military should reenact the story of the Israelites’ capture of Jericho.

The survey question referred to the biblical story when Joshua’s army was said to have killed every man, woman and child after capturing the city.

It read: “Do you support or oppose the claim that the IDF, when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, killing all its inhabitants?”

Israeli ministers have in recent months been advocating for the “voluntary” migration of Palestinians from Gaza, empowered by US president Donald Trump voicing ambitions for a US takeover of the territory and the expulsion of its residents.

The country’s defence minister, Israel Katz, has established a military body dedicated to accelerating their displacement.

The government vowed earlier this month to “conquer” and occupy the entire Gaza Strip in a renewed ground offensive codenamed ‘Gideon’s Chariots’.

It has since issued a swathe of new displacement orders and seized more territory, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and pushing them into ever-smaller corners of the strip.

Around 80% of the territory is now off limits to Palestinians, the UN secretary-general said Friday.

Since announcing the renewed offensive, Israeli ministers have been speaking in blunt terms about their ambitions to depopulate the territory.

“Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to … the south to a humanitarian zone without Hamas or terrorism, and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries,” the country’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich declared this week.

“We are conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza”, he said in a statement that a day later was praised by Netanyahu as “speaking the truth”.

Top Israeli officials – including Netanyahu and the military’s chief spokesperson – have declared that the population will be displaced during the ongoing operation and have framed it in humanitarian terms to “protect” the Palestinians.

It remains unclear which countries they expect them to move to.

Egypt and Jordan have faced down pressure from Washington to open their borders to Palestinian refugees. Unconfirmed reports suggest the US and Israel have approached Sudan, Morocco, Syria and Somaliland.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed this week that the administration is in talks with countries about accepting Palestinians. This came a few days after the administration denied a report that it had approached authorities in Libya about deporting 1 million Palestinians to the country.

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