Smotrich says his call to ‘wipe out’ Huwara was an emotional ‘slip of the tongue’

Far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich says his call earlier this week to “wipe out” the West Bank town of Huwara after settlers rampaged there following a terror attack, was a “slip of the tongue” made in “a storm of emotions.”

Speaking to Channel 12 news, Smotrich, one of the most senior members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, says his choice of words was “incorrect.”

“It was a slip of the tongue in a storm of emotions,” he says, apparently referring to the killing of two Israeli brothers in the Huwara terror attack.

“It’s outrageous that anyone would think that I meant” to literally wipe out Huwara, he adds. “It goes without saying.”

Smotrich refuses to say that the actions of the extremist settlers who rampaged through the Nablus-area town and set homes and cars on fire, resulting in one Palestinian shot dead and several badly hurt, was terror.

He says the rampage is “a very serious nationalist crime, but not terror.”