The Hind Rajab Foundation has filed a criminal complaint in Italy against Idit Silman, Israel's Minister of Environmental Protection, for direct and public incitement to commit genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza. Silman arrived in Italy on September 6 with her husband, and the foundation has called on Italian authorities to open an immediate investigation.
According to the foundation, its investigation documents a sustained and escalating two-year campaign in which Silman publicly called for the removal of Gaza's Palestinian population, defended the deprivation of humanitarian aid, denied the existence of the Palestinian people, and advocated Israeli settlement and permanent control over Palestinian land, statements made repeatedly at rallies, in broadcast interviews, on social media, in parliament, and while exercising the authority of a serving cabinet minister.
At the center of the case is Silman's repeated demand to empty Gaza of its people. At an ultranationalist rally in occupied Jerusalem in February 2025, the foundation says, Silman declared that the only solution for Gaza was to empty it of Gazans, and repeated the same call on Israeli radio in March 2025, describing the proposal as realistic and contemplating that Palestinians could be forced to leave. These were not calls directed at fighters, the foundation stresses, but at the civilian population of Gaza as a whole. In the same breath, Silman invoked what she called a divine mandate to "inherit the land," insisting Israel must remain in Gaza. The foundation says this establishes the core of her position: Palestinians must disappear, and Israel must remain.
The complaint documents that Silman paired her calls for expulsion with open support for starving Gaza. In March 2025, she stated plainly, "We most definitely stopped humanitarian aid," made nine days after Israel halted the entry of aid into Gaza while some two million Palestinians remained trapped, most of them displaced. She also signed a letter urging the government to adopt the so-called Generals' Plan, which proposed turning northern Gaza into a closed military zone and cutting off food, water, and fuel to those who remained.
Silman has also repeatedly denied that Palestinians exist as a people. The foundation cites her declaring in October 2024 that "there is simply no such thing as a Palestinian people," her claim in May 2025 that there was "no Palestinian people and therefore no Palestinian heritage sites," and her reference in September 2025 to the "fake Palestinian people," asserting they had "no history, no past, and no future." Her statements extended to the occupied West Bank, where she called for seizing Palestinian land in Jenin and Nablus, "we inherit, inheritance from the Lord," and for imposing Israeli sovereignty over the territory.
Silman's record of dehumanizing Palestinians is not confined to words. As Environmental Protection Minister, she personally cleared the legal path for one of the most grotesque schemes yet devised against Palestinian prisoners: a plan by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to surround a prison holding Palestinians with crocodiles. In July 2025, Silman reclassified the Nile crocodile from a protected species to a "tended" or "cultivated" wild animal, a novel legal category that paved the way for Ben-Gvir to introduce the reptiles into moats around Ketziot Prison in the Naqab, a facility holding large numbers of Palestinians that Palestinians know as the Ansar III detention camp.
Silman issued the reclassification despite her own ministry's legal adviser warning she had no authority to do so, and over the objections of the Nature and Parks Authority. Ben-Gvir, who said the scheme was inspired by the Trump administration's "Alligator Alcatraz," celebrated her decree with a photo of himself petting a crocodile and the caption: "Cursed terrorist, thinking of trying to escape? Think again." An Israeli court later froze the transfer on animal-welfare grounds, prompting bitter observations that the courts moved to protect the crocodiles but not the prisoners.
The complaint against Silman is the latest in the Hind Rajab Foundation's sweeping campaign to pursue Israeli officials and soldiers wherever they travel, a strategy that has already forced Israeli ministers to cancel trips for fear of arrest, triggered a probe into War Minister Israel Katz in Greece, and led to detentions and investigations of Israeli soldiers across several countries. By pursuing a sitting cabinet minister for incitement to genocide, the foundation is pressing the case that those who publicly call for the destruction of the Palestinian people, and who use the machinery of the state to advance it, cannot expect to move freely through the world unchallenged.
