By Al Ahed Staff, Agencies
The “Israeli” entity’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Wednesday said the Palestinian village of Huwara in the occupied West Bank should be “wiped out,” and that the “Israeli” entity should be the one to do it.
The remark by Smotrich – one of the most senior members of the entity’s government, and also in charge of the so-called “civilian” affairs in the occupied West Bank – followed riots by “Israeli” settlers in Huwara, leaving one Palestinian martyred and property damaged, in response to an earlier operation that killed two “Israeli” settlers.
His comment, which came in an interview during a financial conference, indicated that as a matter of policy, Tel Aviv should remove the entire town, which has a population of 7,000.
"I liked a tweet that called for the deletion of the village of Huwara, because I think that the village of Huwara should be wiped out. It is the ‘state’ [of ‘Israel’] that should erase it,” he said, referring to a tweet by Samaria Regional Council Deputy Mayor Davidi Ben Zion that called for something similar.
He added that “God forbid,” private citizens shouldn’t take it upon themselves to do it, and condemned the rampage by “Israeli” settlers days earlier, saying “we shouldn’t be dragged into anarchy in which civilians take the law into their own hands.”
In response, the “Israeli” entity’s opposition Leader Yair Lapid called Smotrich’s remarks an “incitement to war crimes."
“Jews don’t carry out pogroms and Jews don’t wipe out villages. The government has gone off the rails,” Lapid said.
US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price echoed Lapid's condemnation, calling the comments by Smotrich "irresponsible, repugnant, and disgusting."
"Notwithstanding the fact that ‘Israel’ has been subjected to a recent wave of horrific terror attacks against its civilians, it is absolutely not ‘Israeli’ policy and it’s against our values to respond by wiping out civilian villages," the “Israeli” Ambassador to the US Michael Herzog told reporters.
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