The Minister of Heritage of Israel, the far-right Amihai Eliyahu, defended this Friday the total occupation of the Gaza Strip after the end of the war with the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
“Anyone who has the illusion that [o Hamas] will govern again, he does not want to remember what happened,” said Eliyahu, quoted by the Spanish agency Europa Press.
In November, Eliyahu drew widespread condemnation from countries in the region for claiming that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip could be an option to take down Hamas.
In August, he also defended the occupation of the Gaza Strip by Israeli settlers.
The Gaza Strip is a small Palestinian territory with 2.3 million inhabitants that has been under the control of Hamas since 2007, unlike the West Bank, whose part not occupied by Israel is governed by the Palestinian Authority.
Israel declared war on Hamas after the Islamist group killed 1,200 people on Israeli soil on October 7 and took 240 hostages, according to authorities.
In retaliation, Israel launched an air and ground offensive in the Gaza Strip that has since killed more than 18,600 people, according to Hamas health structures.
Eliyahu said the Oct. 7 attacks “were the most despicable thing that has happened since the Holocaust,” according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and extermination of six million Jews and other ethnic minorities carried out by the Nazi regime in Germany between 1933 and the end of World War II (1939-1945).
The current Israeli Government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) is the result of a coalition of the right, extreme right and ultra-Orthodox.
Eliyahu, a member of Otzma Yehudit, the party led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, also defended soldiers who were singing and chanting Jewish prayers over loudspeakers at a mosque in the West Bank city of Jenin.
“To win you need a little cruelty. To win you have to be a little scary,” he said.
The soldiers were suspended by the army, but Ben Gvir criticized the decision, which he considered shameful.
“It is regrettable that the Ministry of Defense introduces this policy in the Israel Defense Forces,” declared the Minister of National Security on social networks, quoted by Europa Press.
Gvir considered the soldiers as heroes who “risked their lives in the operation in Jenin and that the decision to suspend them” harms the morale “of elements of the Israeli forces.
In announcing the suspension, the Israeli military considered the soldiers’ behavior serious and “completely contrary to the values” of the Israel Defense Forces.
Since the war began on October 7, more than 260 Palestinians have been killed by the army or in attacks by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to authorities.
Source: TSF
