Eliminating all Palestinians is Israeli premier's 'obsession,' says French Goncourt laureate

By Yasemin Kalyoncuoglu

ANKARA (AA) – Eliminating all Palestinians is the Israeli prime minister's "obsession," an award-winning French-Moroccan author said.

The top French prize Goncourt laureate Tahar Ben Jelloun, in an interview with Anadolu, described the developments in Gaza as "a tragedy."

“Netanyahu and his army plan to eliminate all the Palestinians,” the writer stressed, adding, “This is his obsession; killing as many Palestinians as possible and not leaving any Palestinians on the planet…”

However, the writer asserted that Israelis do not want the term "genocide" to be used in any context other than that of Jews.

"But when you bomb a hospital, a school, or a village where there are only sleeping families, and you massacre everyone, that is genocide," Ben Jelloun said, adding that Israelis are not interested in peace, so there is no path leading to dialogue and negotiations.

He said he wrote a book about Palestine and Gaza, published in Italy due to a lack of suitable conditions in France.

"I narrated the horror of Oct. 7 as well as that of the Israeli army," said the writer, who was insulted by his Arab friends for relating the Palestinian group Hamas' attacks on one side and chastised by Jewish friends for being antisemitic on the other.

Ben Jelloun, who describes himself as a free intellectual who speaks his mind, wrote an open letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a month ago that was published in some newspapers.

In this letter, he told Netanyahu that “he lost the war, and Palestine will remain there even if he killed everyone, and the Palestinian people will always be.”

Ben Jelloun was born in Morocco in 1944 and moved to France in 1971 to pursue sociology and social psychiatry studies.

In 1987, he became the first Moroccan writer to receive France's top literary prize, the Goncourt, for his novel The Sacred Night.

Israel has waged a deadly military offensive on the Gaza Strip since an Oct. 7 cross-border attack led by Hamas in which some 1,200 Israelis were killed.

Nearly 32,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have since been killed in Gaza, and nearly 74,200 injured amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities.

The Israeli war, now in its 167th day, has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid a crippling blockade of most food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, which in January issued an interim ruling ordering Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.