Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should have fired his heritage minister Amihai Eliyahu for saying that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “an option” in the war against Hamas, the newspaper Haaretz has said.
The left-leaning publication has been a regular critic of Netanyahu’s premiership and has condemned him for the security failures that preceded the Hamas attacks on October 7 in which 1,400 Israelis were killed and more than 240 taken as hostages, according to figures provided by the Associated Press.
Eliyahu was widely criticized for comments he made in a radio interview in which he said that “there are no non-combatants in Gaza” and that providing humanitarian aid to the Strip would constitute “a failure.” Asked about a hypothetical nuclear option, Eliyahu replied: “That’s one way.”
Netanyahu’s office issued a statement that said that Eliyahu, a far-right politician who is a resident of the West Bank settlement of Rimonim, had been suspended from Cabinet meetings. It added that Eliyahu’s comments “are not based in reality. Israel and the IDF (military) are operating in accordance with the highest standards of international law to avoid harming innocents.”
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Eliyahu responded on social media: “It is clear to anyone who is sensible that the nuclear remark was metaphorical.”
“A strong and disproportionate response to terrorism is definitely required,” he added.
In an op-ed on Monday, Haaretz said Eliyahu’s remark “is a problem not for Israeli public diplomacy but rather for Israeli reality.” Describing Netanyahu’s response as “lame,” the op-ed took aim at how “entire swaths of the government belong to the dangerous far right.”
The paper said Eliyahu’s comment “was not a slip of the tongue” and that it echoed sentiments expressed by his party colleague, lawmaker Yitzhak Kroizer, who told Army Radio on Sunday that the Gaza Strip “should be flattened” and the aim must be to wipe it “off the map.”
“Netanyahu isn’t the solution, but the problem,” said the op-ed, which claimed he had “legitimized” the far right and that under his tenure, Israel “has grown more extreme, and people who used to be loathsome pariahs are now senior cabinet ministers.”
Ideas that “used to be outside the consensus, such as ‘transferring’ Arabs from Israel and Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount,” an explosive issue given that only Muslims can worship there, “have been normalized under Netanyahu’s irresponsible leadership.”
It said that the incident shows the “power and legitimacy” in both Israel and in the government of the “Kahanist, messianic Jewish far right which supports annexation and occupation” and and sees the war against Hamas “as an opportunity.”
“The only way to solve the problem is to remove the far right from the government, and from the bounds of Israeli legitimacy,” the article added.
Newsweek has contacted Netanyahu’s office for comment.
The op-ed comes as Netanyahu said on Tuesday that Israel would consider “tactical little pauses” in fighting in the Gaza Strip to let hostages leave or for aid to get through, although he has again rejected calls for a ceasefire despite international pressure.
Israel’s military has encircled Gaza City in the north of the territory, where the Hamas Islamist group is based, which Netanyahu has vowed to destroy.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.