Far-right minister says Israel pushing to ‘wipe out’ Gaza, will make it Jewish

Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu said Thursday that Israel is advancing the destruction of Gaza, and that the Strip will be made totally Jewish, drawing outcry among opposition politicians and eventually from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

“The government is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu told Haredi radio station Kol Barama. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil. We are pushing this population that has been educated on ‘Mein Kampf.'”

Eliyahu said that Gaza will be cleared for Jewish settlement and that Jewish towns won’t be “fenced in inside cantons.”

“All Gaza will be Jewish,” he said, though he clarified that Arabs who are loyal to Israel will be tolerated.

“We aren’t racists,” the far-right Otzma Yehudit politician added. “We are fighting those who fight us.”

Eliyahu also denied that Gazans are not getting enough food, calling it a campaign against Israel, but noted that the country was at war and trying to kill “these monsters.”

“There’s no hunger in Gaza,” he said. “But we don’t need to be concerned with hunger in the Strip. Let the world worry about it.”

Eliyahu’s inflammatory remarks came as Israel faces growing worldwide condemnation over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where aid groups and world leaders have protested that starvation is spreading and must be urgently addressed.

Israel, which controls much of the enclave’s territory and backs the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a controversial American initiative to deliver aid, says it makes extensive efforts to provide aid and denies claims of famine.

It has published photos of aid trucks waiting for pickup in Gaza. The UN has countered that conditions are too dangerous to effectively deliver those supplies.

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid said Eliyahu’s comments on Gaza were “an attack on values and a public relations disaster.”

“Israel will never convince the world of the righteousness of our war against terror so long as we are led by an extremist minority government with ministers who sanctify blood and death,” he said in a statement.

Lapid added that Israel’s soldiers are not “fighting, dying, and being injured in order to wipe out a civilian population.”

“This is a government that has lost its sanity, I told you,” The Democrats leader Yair Golan wrote on X.

MK Ayman Odeh, head of the Hadash-Ta’al alliance, tweeted that “this is exactly how they spoke in Germany.”

Labor MK Gilad Kariv said that Eliyahu’s continued tenure as a government minister “casts a stain and a disgrace on the State of Israel and the entire Jewish people.”

“This is a violent, unrestrained nationalist who preaches carrying out war crimes, and in doing so violates not only international law but also the laws of the State of Israel,” he wrote on X.

After holding his tongue throughout the afternoon and evening, Netanyahu issued an English statement on his office’s official X account after midnight on Thursday-Friday in which he declared that Eliyahu “does not speak for the government I lead.”

“He is not a member of the security cabinet that determines the conduct of the war,” Netanyahu added.

The prime minister did not announce any disciplinary action against Eliyahu, who has a history of incendiary rhetoric against Palestinians.

An hour earlier, Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter tweeted that the “quotes attributed to” the minister do not reflect government policy.

“The quotes attributed to Minister Eliyahu are wrong, foolish and totally unrepresentative of the government and people of Israel,” Leiter wrote, apparently suggesting that Eliyahu may not have made the comments, even though they were recorded on the radio. No other government official condemned Eliyahu’s remarks.

Eliyahu, an observant Jew and grandson of former Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel Mordechai Eliyahu, is no stranger to making controversial remarks. In May, he said Israel should bomb food and fuel reserves in Gaza to starve the population as part of a strategy of exerting direct pressure on Hamas by targeting the civilian population.

In November 2023, he sparked international outrage by claiming that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “an option” — a statement called “detached from reality” by Netanyahu.

This statement was later cited by South Africa in a motion accusing Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice, prompting Eliyahu to brag that “even in The Hague they know my position.”

The incendiary comment from Eliyahu, along with similar ones from other Israeli leaders, was used to try and show that Israel had genocidal intent in Gaza. Israel vociferously denies the allegations and says Hamas is responsible for many civilian deaths because it uses the Gaza population as human shields.

The war in Gaza began with the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, invasion and massacres, during which terrorists killed some 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages to Gaza.

In the ensuing war, some 58,000 people in Gaza have been killed, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry. Hamas casualty figures cannot be verified and do not differentiate between combatants and civilians.