Firebrand Eric Zemmour has been criticised for his comments and compared to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels

The French army has a secret plan to ethnically cleanse Muslims from France with the help of Israeli military 'specialists', according to a controversial political commentator.

Eric Zemmour said that the onslaught against an Islamic community of some five million people already has a name - Operation Brambles - and will be based on recent campaigns against Palestinian Arabs in Gaza.

Critics meanwhile branded Zemmour a 'racist cretin' producing Nazi-style propaganda aimed at dehumanising his enemies and spreading racism.

Zemmour, 58, told RTL radio: 'The General Staff of the army knows that a day will come when it will have to regain what has become alien land on our own soil.'

'The plan is already in the pipeline, it is called Operation Brambles. It was developed with the help of Israeli army specialists who have passed on to their French colleagues their experience of Gaza. Everybody is talking about the comparison'.

Zemmour claimed he had heard about the plan thought his contacts in the French Army hierarchy.

A woman in a burkini (concealing Islamic bathing suit) in southern France. A number of states across the country have repealed the ban against it amid much fanfare although some chose to uphold the law

But Tariq Ramadan, professor of contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, said Zemmour had a produced a 'key text for the cretinisation of spirits and a victory for the worst in France'.

Others took to Twitter to compare Zemmour to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Neither the French nor the Israeli army was immediately in a position to offer a reaction to Mr Zemmour's claims.

More than 500 children were among some 2300 Palestinians killed, and a further 10,000 mainly civilians were wounded when the Israeli last launched a major offensive in Gaza in the summer of 2014.

Tensions running high: a fight in a housing estate in Bastia on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica broke out in August after a group of youngsters of Maghreb origin insulted tourists who were photographing women bathing in burkinis. The island voted to uphold its burkini ban this week

In turn, Israel lost 66 soldiers and six civilians, and suffered some 500 wounded during the so-called Operation Protective Edge.

It led to allegations of crimes against humanity by both Israel and the military wing of Hamas, the governing authority of the Gaza Strip.

Israel continues to launch bombing raids on Gaza, in response to the firing of Hamas rockets, and to launch ground operations on the occupied West Bank.

Zemmour, who has convictions for inciting racist hate, said that such tactics would be vital if France was to 'reconquer' its cities and towns.

'French people have become foreigners in their own land,' he said, claiming there were places where 'there are no French people, only Muslims'.

Zemmour expands on his thoughts about the military operation in a newly published essay, 'A Five Year Term for Nothing', even comparing the situations to the Algerian War in reverse.

It saw mainly Algerian Muslims win their independence from France in 1962, following one of the bloodiest wars in colonial history.

Many French forced to return home after independence were bitterly angry, and helped form the National Front party, which has frequently expressed support for Zemmour's views.

Zemmour himself comes from a Jewish family who fled Algeria during the war, settling in the Paris suburbs.