Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Deputy parliament speaker Nissim Vaturi also called for the destruction of Jenin, warning that it will soon be turned into Gaza
The deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament has called for the separation of children from their mothers and the killing of adults in Gaza.
During an interview with Kol BaRama radio, Nissim Vaturi called Palestinians “scoundrels” and “subhumans”, adding that this is a group of people that cannot be accepted.
“Who is innocent in Gaza? Civilians went out and slaughtered people in cold blood,” Vaturi said on Kol BaRama radio.
“They are outcasts and no one in the world wants them,” he said, adding that Israel needs to “separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza, we are being too considerate.
…
The deputy speaker, who belongs to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, also said that the occupied West Bank city of Jenin will soon turn into Gaza, saying that Palestinians released as part of the ceasefire deal should be put there “so that they can be eliminated later”.
“Erase Jenin. Don’t start looking for the terrorists – if there’s a terrorist in the house, take him down, tell the women and children to get out,” he added.
…
The violent rhetoric issued by top Israeli leaders like Vaturi has been used as evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent in its war on Gaza, which has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians and utterly devastated the enclave.
Lawyers for South Africa used their statements at the International Court of Justice in a case accusing Israel of waging genocide in Gaza. In a preliminary judgement, the world’s highest court said South Africa’s accusation was plausible.
A Palestinian child plays amid the rubble of destroyed buildings at the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza, Palestine on January 2, 2025. (Photo: Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images)
The Knesset members are urging the Israeli military to destroy all sources of water, food, and energy—and to kill “anyone not flying a white flag of surrender.”
At least seven far-right members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, are calling on the country’s defense minister to order the total destruction of northern Gaza’s food, water, and energy sources—most of which have already been obliterated by 15 months of relentless attacks—and the killing of any Palestinian who isn’t clearly surrendering to the attackers.
In a letter to Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz dated December 31, the lawmakers assert that the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) campaign to forcibly expel Palestinians from northern Gaza—which critics have called ethnic cleansing—”isn’t being done properly” and is not “achieving the war objectives as defined by the government, which is the dismantling of Hamas’ governing and military capabilities.”
According to a translation by international humanitarian law expert Itay Epshtain on Thursday, the letter calls on the IDF to:
Destroy all energy sources including fuel, solar systems, generators, and power lines;
Destroy all food sources including warehouses, water, and water pumps; and
Lay siege and remotely kill everyone not flying a white flag of surrender.
That last demand apparently includes men, women, and children. IDF troops would then “enter gradually for a complete cleansing of the enemy’s nests,” according to the letter.
Lawmakers who signed the letter and their party affiliations include: Avraham Bezalel (Shas), Amit Halevi (Likud), Limor Son Har-Melech (Jewish Power), Osher Shkalim (Likud), Zvi Sukkot and Ohad Tal (Religious Zionism), and Nissim Vaturi (Likud).
Vaturi, the deputy Knesset speaker, previously called for Gaza to be “wiped off the face of the Earth” and argued for Israel to “stop being humane” and “burn Gaza now,” because “there are no innocents there.”
Notably, the lawmakers’ letter does not mention anything about freeing the more than 60 hostages believed to be alive and imprisoned by Hamas and possibly other groups in Gaza.
As Israeli journalist Bar Peleg reported Friday from the Jabalia refugee camp:
When the soldiers and officers in Jabalia are asked about their mission, the answer is destroying Hamas and its infrastructure, until the last terrorist is laid to rest. When they are asked, “And what about the hostages?” One soldier answered, “That concerns us, like it does everyone, but it isn’t a part of our operational considerations.”
Northern Gaza is already in ruins. As Peleg noted, “not a single habitable building remains” in Jabalia. Nearly all homes, hospitals, schools, and other infrastructure have been destroyed or damaged.
“Look at the extent of the destruction and annihilation here,” one IDF officer said. “No one has done this before.”
An IDF officer recently told Haaretz that one commander, Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach, seeks to personally execute the so-called Generals’ Plan—a blueprint for the starvation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from northern Gaza—by besieging and expelling 250,000 Palestinians from the area. United Nations officials estimate that more than 100,000 Palestinians have been forced from northern Gaza, even as the IDF says it disavows the Generals’ Plan.
Israeli policies and actions, as well as written and spoken calls for the destruction of Gaza and its people, have been presented as evidence in the South African-led genocide case against Israel currently before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister who ordered the siege of Gaza, are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, which in November issued arrest warrants for the pair and Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri.
Israel’s 455-day bombardment, invasion, and siege of Gaza has left at least 165,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to officials there.
Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi is one of many Israeli leaders who have made genocidal statements against Palestinians.
Nissim Vaturi, the far-right deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, raised eyebrows and ire Friday after asserting on social media that Israel’s war on Gaza—which has killed and maimed over 40,000 people and displaced around 70% of the population—is “too humane.”
“All of this preoccupation with whether or not there is internet in Gaza shows that we have learned nothing,” Vaturi, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, wrote Friday after the country’s war Cabinet approved extremely limited fuel deliveries into the besieged strip. “We are too humane. Burn Gaza now, no less!”
“Don’t allow fuel in, don’t allow water in until the hostages are returned back!” Vaturi added, a reference to the approximately 240 Israelis and others kidnapped by Hamas-led militants during the October 7 infiltration attack that killed around 1,200 people in southern Israel.
Inciting to GENOCIDE, Israeli Parliament's Deputy Speaker, Nissim Vaturi (Likud), says Israel has been "too humane" & must "Burn Gaza now no less!"
When Israeli journalist Ben Caspit responded to the post with a comment that he feared Vaturi’s words could fuel “anti-Israel propaganda,” the lawmaker shot back: “Your fear will kill us. Stop being humane.”
The social media platform X—whose multibillionaire owner Elon Musk is in hot water for promoting an anti-semitic post—deleted Vaturi’s tweet, and others including one in which he wrote that Israel should leave just “one old man” alive in Gaza so he could “tell everyone” what happened there.
Vaturi recently pushed for the suspension of colleague Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the leftist Hadash party, for comments critical of the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza and for calling for the protection of civilians on both sides, including by saying that “a child is a child,” whether Israeli or Palestinian.
Over 5,000 Palestinian children are among the more than 12,300 people killed during Israel’s 43-day bombardment and invasion of Gaza, which has also maimed at least 30,000 others, according to Gazan health officials. Half the homes in the embattled strip have been damaged or destroyed, with around 1.7 million Palestinians forcibly displaced. Thousands of people are missing and feared buried beneath rubble. In the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers since October 7, while over 2,800 others have been arrested.
Vaturi is far from alone in making what legal experts call statements of genocidal intent.
Earlier this month, Israeli President Isaac Herzog asserted that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, while Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to “eliminate everything” there.
Galit Distel Atbaryan, a member of the Knesset from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said that “Gaza should be wiped off the map.”
Ariel Kallner, another Likud parliamentarian, urged a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48,” a reference to the forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1947-49.
Yet another Likud lawmaker, Tally Gotliv, demanded nothing less than a “doomsday kiss”—that is, use of Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons. “Not flattening a neighborhood,” she clarified, but “crushing and flattening Gaza. Without mercy!”
Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, who said “we are now rolling out the Great Nakba,” was admonished by Netanyahu for saying the quiet part out loud.
Netanyahu said it out loud last month during a televised address when he called Israel’s imminent ground invasion of Gaza a “holy mission” and invoked Amalek, the ancient biblical enemy of the Israelites whom God commanded his “chosen people” to exterminate, in what critics called “an explicit call to genocide.”
Noting that statements of intent to commit genocide are a key element of the crime, Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal toldDemocracy Now! in an interview last month that “if this is not special intent to commit genocide, I really don’t know what is.”
“We’re seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent,” he added. “This is indeed a textbook case of genocide.”
