A former Israeli defense minister has accused Israel of committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, drawing a sharp rebuke from government ranks.

Moshe Yaalon, a hawkish former general, told Israeli media that hardliners in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right cabinet were looking to chase Palestinians from northern Gaza and wanted to re-establish Jewish settlements there.

"I am compelled to warn about what is happening there and is being concealed from us," Yaalon told Israel's public broadcaster Kan on Sunday. "At the end of the day, war crimes are being committed."

Yaalon is a former army chief of staff who served as defense minister under Netanyahu from 2013-16, and has been a fierce critic of the prime minister ever since.

Netanyahu's Likud party accused him of spreading "slanderous lies," while Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar, head of a small rightist party, said his accusations were baseless.

"Everything Israel does is in accordance with international law and it is a pity that former minister Ya'alon does not realize the damage that he has done and retract his remarks," he told a conference hosted by Israel Today newspaper.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) last month issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense chief Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.

Netanyahu and Gallant both rejected the charges, but in a separate interview with Democrat TV on Saturday, Yaalon warned that the nation was at a crossroads with the government looking "to conquer, to annex, to carry out ethnic cleansing."

SURPRISE ATTACK

Palestinians have long accused Israel of looking to chase them out of swathes of Gaza during the ongoing conflict.

Israel has been at war in Gaza since October 2023, after Hamas militants launched a surprise attack in which they killed about 1,200 people and abducted more than 250 hostages. Israel's military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 44,400 people and displaced nearly all of the enclave's population.

In recent weeks, the Israelis have focused much of their firepower back on northern Gaza, saying they are targeting Hamas fighters who have regrouped, and urging civilians to leave the area until further notice.

"What is going on there? There is no Beit Lahiya, no Beit Hanoun, they are operating now in Jabaliya and basically cleaning the area of Arabs," Yaalon told Democrat TV, referring to Palestinian neighborhoods north of Gaza City.

He added that hardliners wanted to establish Jewish settlement there, 19 years after Israel withdrew from the territory - a disengagement Yaalon had opposed at the time.

Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf visited the Gaza border last Thursday and backed an initiative to re-establish settlements in the enclave. "Jewish settlement here is the answer to the terrible (Oct. 7, 2023) massacre and the answer to the International Criminal Court in the Hague," Goldknopf was quoted as saying in Israeli media.

Most world powers deem settlements built in territory Israel seized in the 1967 war as illegal and see their expansion as an obstacle to peace, since they eat away at land the Palestinians want for a future state.