Amichai Eliyahu’s comments have drawn strong criticism from both Israel and Palestine.
Amichai Eliyahu, the minister of Israeli heritage, has hinted that his nation would attack Gaza with nuclear weapons. The Israeli government was outraged at Eliyahu’s words, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suspended him indefinitely as a result.
In a Sunday interview with Radio Kol Berama, the minister—a member of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party—replied, “This is one of the possibilities,” when asked if Israel could drop an atomic bomb on the Palestinian enclave.
Eliyahu also made statements opposing providing humanitarian aid to the residents of the enclave, which has been under Israeli siege for a number of weeks. He said that “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza” and that “we wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid.”
Netanyahu declared shortly after the contentious comments that the minister would no longer be allowed to attend any cabinet meetings. His office said in a writing on X (formerly Twitter) that Israel is “operating in accordance with the highest standards of international law to avoid harming innocents” and that “Eliyahu’s statements are not based in reality.”
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant wrote in a post on X that he was “glad that these are not the people in charge of Israel’s security” and denounced Eliyahu’s “baseless and irresponsible words.”
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Opposition leader Yair Lapid repeated those comments, labelling Eliyahu a “extremist” and advocating for Netanyahu to replace the minister because his remarks “caused harm to the families of the hostages, Israeli society, and our international standing.”
Hamas, which surprised Israel with an attack last month, was apparently aware of the minister’s comments. Following Israel’s “military failure in the face of the [Palestinian] resistance,” it declared that the remarks are a “expression of the occupiers’ Nazism and [their] genocide practises.”
Eliyahu, meantime, made an effort to contain the damage by maintaining that “the comment about the atom was metaphorical, as is obvious to anyone with a brain.” In spite of this, he insisted, Israel “must display a forceful and disproportional response to terror,” adding that doing so will demonstrate to “the Nazis and their supporters that terrorism isn’t worthwhile.”
Israel has never acknowledged or refuted having nuclear weapons in public. It is generally accepted, meanwhile, that it has had these weapons since the late 1960s. An estimate from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) states that the country possesses 90 warheads in total.
