Israeli Minister Who Called for Nuking Gaza Appears to Stand by Comment

Fox News host Mark Levin has previously reposted an oped stating that 'There Are No Innocent Palestinians’

Amichai Eliyahu, Israel's Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage minister, appeared to stand by his previous comment that his country should strike the Gaza Strip with a “nuclear bomb” because there are no innocent civilians in the coastal enclave.

While his views have been called extreme, mainstream news personalities in the U.S., like Fox News’s Mark Levin, have suggested that Israel should go nuclear if it begins to lose. The commentator also retweeted a column asking if there is such a thing as innocents in Gaza.

Eliyahu said in November that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was an option on the table. The minister told The Times of Israel on Wednesday that The Hague “knows his opinion” about how Gaza should be dealt with.

The comment was not the first from an Israeli official to be criticized for its callousness.

Galit Distel-Atbaryan, a Knesset member and former information minister, called for “erasing all of Gaza from the face of the Earth” and making it so “the Gazan monsters will fly to the southern fence and try to enter Egyptian territory – or they will die….Gaza should be erased.”

Nissim Vaturi, a far-right member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said in an interview last month that he stands by his earlier comment that Israel has been too soft in Gaza and should burn the coastal enclave to the ground.

Vaturi said he stands by his comment because it is “better to burn, to bring down buildings than for soldiers to be hurt.”

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister who was once considered a hardliner but now is an Israeli moderate, said there are two million Palestinians in Gaza who want to “slaughter, rape, and murder Jews.”

Smotrich urged Palestinians to leave the coastal enclave so Israelis could "make the desert bloom," The Jerusalem Post reported. He said 70 percent of Israelis agree with him that Palestinians need to be moved from the enclave.

The Times of Israel reported: A resettlement policy is necessary, he said, because “a small country like ours cannot afford a reality where four minutes away from our communities there is a hotbed of hatred and terrorism, where two million people wake up every morning with aspiration for the destruction of the State of Israel and with a desire to slaughter and rape and murder Jews wherever they are.”