Israeli minister wanted to “nuke Gaza”

AFP | Jerusalem, Undefined

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Israel’s government on Sunday reprimanded an ultranationalist junior minister who advocated in an interview dropping a nuclear bomb on war-torn Gaza, labelling his comments “disconnected from reality”.

Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu was also suspended from government meetings “until further notice”, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said, stressing that Israel was seeking to spare “non-combatants”.

Despite the immediate reprimand, the junior minister’s inflammatory comments drew wide condemnation from within Israel and across the Middle East.

Eliyahu told Israel’s Kol Barama radio he was not entirely satisfied with the scale of Israel’s retaliation.

When the interviewer asked whether he advocated dropping “some kind of atomic bomb” on Gaza “to kill everyone”, Eliyahu replied: “That’s one option.”

In a follow-up question about the hostages held in Gaza, Eliyahu said that “in war we pay a price”. “Why are the lives of the hostages... more important than the lives of the soldiers?” he said.

The Hostages and Missing Persons and Families Forum, representing relatives of people taken by Hamas, slammed Eliyahu’s “reckless and cruel” statements.

“International law, along with fundamental principles of human morality and common sense, strictly prohibits the use of mass destruction weapons,” it said in a statement.

Following the outcry over his remarks, Eliyahu said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that his statement about the atomic bomb was “metaphorical” and that Israel was “committed to doing everything possible to return the hostages safe and sound”.