(LifeSiteNews) — With Israel’s full humanitarian blockade entering its 11th week, public comments by political officials indicate this deprivation of food, water, and medical supplies, ordered toward the starvation of one million children in the Gaza Strip, is fully intended and desired by at least several Members of the Knesset (MK).
“I want to starve Gazans completely, a full siege,” said MK Moshe Saada late last month on Israeli television. “It is our duty to expel the Gazans” and use starvation as a means to achieve this goal.
Commenting on her online news program, The Young Turks, hostess Ana Kasparian recognized this as admitting “starvation isn’t just a side effect of this war on Gaza, it’s part of the goal, it’s part of the Israeli government and the IDF’s strategy” to use “starvation as a tool for punishing and driving civilians out of Gaza, which of course is considered a war crime. It violates international laws.”
Naturally, with such a policy being currently implemented by the Israeli government, it only makes sense that Saada’s point of view is not an outlier among his Knesset colleagues but is accepted and embraced more broadly.
Kasparian and her co-host Cenk Uygur highlighted a May 10 report from the Israeli publication Haaretz revealing comments made by MKs advancing the same genocidal hostilities.
During a subcommittee meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, on Gaza’s humanitarian crisis, Dr. Sharon Shaul from NATAN, an Israeli-based organization that provides humanitarian aid around the world, made what one would expect to be an obvious remark which triggered a sharp and hostile response.
“I think that even everyone sitting around this table doesn’t want a suffering child to be unable to receive painkillers or minimal medical treatment,” she plainly assumed.
Yet interrupting her was MK Amit Halevi, stating angrily, “I’m not sure you’re speaking for us when you say we want to treat every child and every woman. I hope you don’t stand behind that statement either. When fighting a group like this, the distinctions that exist in a normal world don’t exist.”
Responding in his commentary, Uygur retorted, “No, Amit, they do exist. It’s just that you’re a monster and you’d like to be like the Nazis and murder children. That moral distinction exists for the rest of us who are not Nazis like you.”
Attempting to touch their hearts with a concrete example, Shaul replied to Halevi, “I hope that you too don’t want a 4-year-old whose arm has been amputated to go without painkillers. I hope you have that empathy too.”
MK Limor Son Har-Melech from the Religious Zionist Party, snapped back, pointing at Shaul, “The only treatment needed here is for you.” Another participant remarked, “You are the sickest doctor I’ve ever seen.”
Anti-Palestinian hate and genocidal malice mainstream among Israeli leaders, public
Commenting generally on such public statements, highlighting Saada’s above, Israeli columnist Gideon Levy writes, “It was only to be expected: The discourse has taken on neo-Nazi attributes. Boundaries have fallen and bloodletting has been legitimized.”
Calling such rhetoric “incitement to genocide,” Levy observes how these extremely violent dehumanizing sentiments now reflect normative Zionist mainstream perspectives in Israel providing media outlets with financial incentives to publish them. “What used to be trash talk often found on social media has become standard media talk, raising questions such as who is for and who is still against genocide,” the Jewish Israeli journalist observed.
Though going largely unreported in the West, such expressions of anti-Palestinian hate—even to the degree of genocidal malice—is nothing new among Jewish Zionist leaders in Israel, and even in the diaspora.
In March, LifeSiteNews released a report extensively documenting the genocidal ideology fueled by the heresy of religious Zionism. The extremist teachings of these sects rationalize the expelling or direct killing of the entire Palestinian population by Jews as a supposed fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
READ: Israeli extremist rabbis instruct soldiers heading to Gaza: ‘Kill all their children’
Having subjected most of the Palestinian population (5.4 million) to a brutal military occupation of their internationally recognized territory for almost 58 years, this deadly ideology has continued to grow among Jewish Israelis until it successfully secured power as part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition in late 2022.
Though tens of thousands of Jews and rabbis wholly reject this heresy the report mentioned above cites many Zionist rabbis approving “indiscriminate killing of civilians,” killing “men, women and children,” wiping out “all of them” (Palestinians) in order to take their land, “do not have mercy on the children. Kill all their children,” “bomb the entire area,” “exterminate the enemy,” block “supplies [and] electricity,” “this is about animals,” “dogs,” the region must be “clean of Arabs” and more.
The article goes on to quote Israeli political leaders who have made similar statements over the years, especially in response to the October 7 Hamas break-out attack upon southern Israel. Legitimizing the targeting of every civilian in Gaza, including children, some have said there are “no innocent civilians in Gaza.” Other comments include, “bomb without distinction!” “these are animals, they have no right to exist,” “erase Gaza. Nothing else will satisfy us,” “we are fighting against animals,” and more.
Almost 70% of Israelis support international crime of ethnic cleansing in Gaza
Naturally, such attitudes are reflected in public opinion as well with polls revealing the broader Israeli population is in general agreement with these religious and political leaders in their desire to exterminate Gaza’s population.
Despite Israel’s horrendous bombing in the Gaza Strip, with the world being inundated with images of entire neighborhoods destroyed, men lifting the corpses of their bloodied and broken children from the rubble, and dirty frantic hospitals treating patients with missing limbs, one late October 2023 Tel Aviv University poll found that 58 percent of Israeli Jews said the army was using too little firepower in its assault on Gaza, and less than 2 percent said it was too much.
Another poll conducted in December 2023 asked, “To what extent should Israel take into consideration the suffering of the civilian population in Gaza when planning the continuation of the fighting there?” Over 80 percent of Jewish Israelis answered, “to a very small extent” or “to a fairly small extent” (40 and 41 percent respectively).
Additionally, in January, 2024, an Israeli Channel 12 poll found that 72 percent of Israelis believe humanitarian aid to the 2 million Gazan civilians, including 1 million children, “must be stopped until the Israeli prisoners are released” by Hamas.
By April 2024, Israel had dropped over 70,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, the equivalent of almost 5 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These bombings have destroyed an estimated 69 percent of structures in Gaza including at least 245,000 homes.
Yet even as this massive destruction and astronomical death toll was compounding every day, a May 2024 Pew Research survey found comparable numbers to previous polls with 34 percent of Israeli respondents still saying Israel’s military response against the Palestinians in Gaza had not gone far enough, 39 percent saying it had been about right, and only 19 percent believing it had gone too far.
Finally, last February, President Donald Trump shocked the world when during a press conference he announced his plan to “permanently” ethnically cleanse two million Palestinians from their internationally recognized native territory.
Despite the plan’s overwhelming rejection by virtually the entire rest of the world, a poll of Israeli adults conducted by the local Channel 12 found that a full 68 percent of respondents supported Trump’s criminal ethnic cleansing plan, while 20 percent opposed it with 12 percent saying they were unsure.
Israeli finance minister: ‘Right and moral’ to starve the entire Gaza population ‘to death’
Not being outdone for his violent anti-Palestinian hate rhetoric, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich asserted last year that according to his heretical religious Zionist doctrines, it would be “right and moral” to starve the entire population (including 1 million children) in Gaza “to death.”
And late last month he admitted that release of the Israeli hostages was not necessarily the government’s first priority, but rather ethnic cleansing was an essential goal as well, pledging that Israel would not stop fighting until “hundreds of thousands of Gazans are on their way out of it to other countries.”
Israel has repeatedly rejected offers by Hamas to free all the Israeli hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire, indicating, once again, a primary goal for Israel involves the ethnic cleansing of the population in Gaza.
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