This astonishing remark was made by Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich during a right-wing conference at the beginning of this week. Smotrich, who until now has expressed only minimal interest in the hostages being held in Gaza, claimed that Israel will not free any of the hostages until drastic measures are taken, such as starving two million people.
Smotrich, an ultra-right fascist in the Israeli government, is currently mostly occupied with harassing Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and driving them out of their homes with the aim of Israel taking over the whole West bank. The fascists in the West Bank are financed by the State of Israel through the Finance ministry and the army and police appear to have received clear instructions not to interfere when Jewish terrorists enter Palestinian villages with the aim to destroy and kill.
The only times this fascist racist has expressed his opinion on the hostages, or on the war in general, he called for the annihilation of the population centers in Gaza as the only way to win the war.
Smotrich, the self-righteous fascist that he is, realizes very well that his remarks and his call for annihilation constitute a war crime, but he is not bothered by that. Apparently, war crimes are allowed as long as it is not against Jews and Israel has shown this again and again.
The Israeli army calculates the number of civilians that will be killed in a military operation in Gaza relative to the number of terrorist that will be killed, such as the bombing of the school this week, which annihilated close to one hundred civilians while only much smaller number of terrorists was killed. Purposely killing civilians, even if it is as part of a military operation is a war crime.
Thousands of terrorists were caught and brought to Israeli detention centers to “await trial”. The detention centers are immensely overcrowded, and the living conditions for these prisoners of war are subhuman. While I agree that, they do not deserve treatment like “regular” prisoners, mistreatment at the current level, is a war crime.
Sexual assault of prisoners is always a war crime even if we are talking about despicable terrorist murderers and the events at a military prison holding terrorists caught in Gaza are extremely disturbing and no doubt must be considered war crimes.
Israel has been repeatedly accused of committing war crimes from the beginning of the Gaza war and often the accusers only aim to harm Israel and damage its reputation of the “most moral army” in the world (who invented this nonsense: a moral army doesn’t exist.) But even with the very limited reporting in Israel of what is really going on in Gaza, it is clear that at least some of these accusations have a basis that must be investigated, either by Israel itself, or by an International forum.
And, even if there are Israelis that apparently do not want to know about war crimes, or like Smotrich, do not care, for the sake of the State of Israel as we once knew it, war crimes cannot be tolerated and perpetrators must stand trial and be punished.
I hope you found this article interesting and I welcome any comments you may have.
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