Israeli minister suggests dropping nuclear bomb on Palestinians in Gaza
URGENT Policy Brief - 6 November 2023
Israeli minister suggests dropping nuclear bomb on Palestinians in Gaza
Accountability Recommendations
On 5 November 2023, Israel's Minister of Heritage (Jewish Power party) Amichai Eliyahu in an interview with Israeli radio suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza ghetto, where 2.3 million Palestinians are trapped under Israeli occupation and total siege. This is the first public admission by an Israeli minister that: 1) Israel possesses nuclear weapons, and 2) Israel may use them to eliminate millions of Palestinians.
Veteran Israeli journalist Yossi Melman reacted to Eliyahu’s revelation saying, ”He destroyed sixty years of [Israel’s nuclear] ambiguity.” It also adds to the irrefutable evidence of Israeli leaders’ intent to commit genocide in Gaza.
Even without a nuclear bomb, Israel has already bombed Gaza with a destructive power equivalent to two nuclear bombs of the size dropped by the US on Hiroshima during WWII.
In Gaza, Israel’s numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity have included indiscriminate bombing, ethnic cleansing, and denial of humanitarian aid, and the illegal use of explosive weapons and white phosphorus against civilians. Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity have also included forced displacement, cutting off water, food, medicine and fuel, and employing “starvation as a weapon of war,” as stated by Oxfam and Palestinian human rights organizations.
UN officials and experts, the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights, 880 international scholars, experts on the Holocaust and genocide, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, world leaders, and Palestinian human rights organizations have all warned of Israel’s unfolding genocide in Gaza.
In addition to all the pressure urgently needed on policymakers worldwide to impose on the US-Israeli axis and its European partners an immediate ceasefire, lifting the siege, and allowing life-saving humanitarian aid into Gaza, grassroots movements and civil society organizations are called upon to immediately apply pressure to investigate and eventually remove Israel’s nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. What adds to the urgency is the fact that Israel is an apartheid state, as designated by a growing consensus of human rights organizations.
A military embargo is urgently needed against Israel, a proven nuclear apartheid state which threatens to use nuclear weapons as part of its genocidal campaign against Palestinians. All states which provide weapons to Israel – especially the US, but also Germany, which sold Israel heavily subsidized Dolphin-class submarines specially modified to carry missiles with nuclear warheads – will be held accountable for their complicity in crimes against humanity and possibly genocide.
As senior UN official Craig Mokhiber has recently written before leaving the UN, “We must advocate for the removal and destruction of Israel’s massive stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, lest the conflict lead to the total destruction of the region and, possibly, beyond.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), hegemonically controlled by the US and European powers like most other “international” entities, has spent years and massive resources intrusively and aggressively investigating states remotely suspected of planning to develop nuclear weapons. Now that Israel is admitting having nuclear bombs and declaring a readiness to use them against Palestinian civilians, the IAEA must be pressured by all states that care about salvaging the sanctity and credibility of international law to investigate, and ultimately remove and destroy, Israel’s nuclear weapons and military nuclear capability. Failing to do so would send a strong message to the rest of humanity that the IAEA is not only hypocritical but also serves as yet another tool of western hegemony over the Global South.