Likud MK: ‘Luckily for us’ October 7 attacks happened so Israel can fight Hamas

MK Nissim Vaturi, who has frequently made headlines for shocking statements about Israel’s war against Hamas, on Tuesday found a silver lining to the terror group’s grisly October 7 massacres, in which some 1,200 people were murdered and 240 kidnapped, mostly civilians.

“We were meant to fight this war against Hamas, as is happening now, and luckily for us it came from the heavens,” Vaturi, a deputy Knesset speaker representing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, said during an interview with the Knesset Channel.

“With all the grief — and there’s a lot of grief — about October 7, if the attack wasn’t only from the south, and rather a coordinated attack [on multiple fronts], we’d be in an even worse situation,” added Vaturi, evoking attacks such as the one that started the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which saw Israel caught off Egyptian troops surging across the Suez Canal and Syrian soldiers breaking through the Golan Heights.

Stressing that Israel needs to be “constantly fighting terror,” Vaturi added his assessment that the fight against Hamas in Gaza, where Israel launched a wide-scale military campaign against the terror group after the October 7 onslaught, “won’t end, definitely not in the coming year.”

Vaturi’s assessment was in line with comments earlier Tuesday by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who vowed Israel would punish Hamas over its brutal October 7 attacks, “whether it takes months or years.”

Vaturi was temporarily banned from Facebook in mid-November, after he wrote “burn Gaza now” in a social media post. Those comments came after the war cabinet approved the entry of two trucks of fuel per day to prevent the collapse of the sewage treatment system, which risked a mass disease outbreak.

He was also sanctioned by the Knesset’s Ethics Committee the following week for falsely accusing two Arab Israeli MKs of supporting Hamas.