ByNews Desk- The Cradle
Since coming to power, the Jewish supremacist security minister has been encouraging settler violence against Palestinians
“We need a military operation, we need to flatten buildings, we need targeted killings,” Ben Gvir told parliament on Wednesday, just hours before the Israeli army conducted the first drone assassination in the West Bank since the Second Intifada.
Violence markedly spiked this week in the West Bank after Palestinian resistance fighters forcefully confronted Israeli troops on Monday. The ensuing battle forced Tel Aviv to launch airstrikes in the West Bank for the first time in 20 years.
A day after making these inflammatory comments, Israeli media revealed Ben Gvir overruled a police decision to freeze work on a contentious wind farm project in the Golan Heights, which this week sparked large protests from the area’s Druze Syrian residents.
Ahead of Ben Gvir’s interference, Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai had ordered to freeze work on the wind farm project to ease tensions in the occupied Syrian territory.
“The work was not planned to continue during the holiday that takes place on Tuesday, but we must not give in to violence and stop the works before the holiday,” Ben Gvir reportedly told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – who heads the Jewish supremacist Religious Zionist party alongside Ben Gvir – echoed this statement on Twitter, writing, “Surrendering to the violence and anarchy of a handful of extremist and violent Druze … would be a failure of the rule of law, and must not be agreed to.”
Israeli daily Haaretz quoted senior defense officials saying that Ben Gvir pushed for the construction work to advance, despite intelligence assessments predicting it would lead to violence.
Ben Gvir’s party has on previous occasions called for the formal annexation of the entire occupied West Bank – in violation of international law – and the seizure of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem to place it under Jewish ownership.
Ben Gvir has led several violent incursions into the Muslim holy site under police protection and has overseen the expulsion of Palestinian worshippers.
Last year, Ben Gvir made headlines for pulling a gun on Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, urging settlers to shoot at the locals.
He is also an outspoken proponent of creating a “deportation law” that would target anyone who is “disloyal” to Israel.
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