The Zionism Observer
An ever-growing database of quotes from Israeli leaders and public figures
The Zionism Observer
The US is threatening not to give us precision missiles. Oh yeah? Well, I got news for the US: we have imprecise missiles and we have the right to defend ourselves. So maybe instead of using a precise missile, and taking down a specific room or a specific building, I'll use my imprecise missiles and I'll just collapse ten buildings. Ten buildings. Ten buildings! That's what I'll do.
[The bodies discovered in mass graves in Nasser Hospital had their hands tied] because we probably arrested the terrorists. I don't know if the terrorists fought back, I wasn't there ... It could be that many were shot and they were shooting in a battle. It could be that there were bombs thrown by them, and grenades ... We don't know what they were doing before their hands were tied behind their backs, do we?
Why are there so many arrestees? Can't we kill some? Are you trying to tell me they all raise their hands? What can we do with so many arrestees. It's dangerous for the soldiers.
7 Boom!
There is a very, very important message here: a hospital is not a safe place.
The Prime Minister must lead the army to enter Rafah. Yes: when they're fasting, when they're tired and exhausted. To tear their bones apart!
[Is there any number of civilian deaths of Palestinians that would stop you carrying on with military action?] ... We can not stop. We will not stop.
Today's terrorists are the children of previous wars, whom we let live. And in reality, it is the women who create the terrorists.
I see victory. I see all their infrastructure being annihilated. I see that they don't have one house [not destroyed]. See hundreds of thousands fleeing like Nakba, walking towards exile! I see it with my own eyes.
Yes, we set fire to houses [in Gaza]. As much as possible. And we are proud of it.
The price they must pay for what they've done to us should not be limited to merely punishing, the killing of insurgents. We are not talking about a conflict imposed on us, that's illogical. We refer to them as 'spaces,' while they call them 'land,' from which the word 'human' is derived. In the Middle East, it means that a human without land is worth nothing and has no right to exist. Therefore, the price they must pay for it to impact future generations is that we must take their land. First, we must take the land, after we have taken their land, we'll think about what we'll do next. The second thing we need to push for, despite all voices and opinions, is new migration and helping them find a new life. Gaza is certainly now destroyed and not suitable for human habitation. And I expect the Western world, as they did by welcoming a million Syrian refugees, to open their doors and welcome the people of Gaza.
We must find ways for Gazans that are more painful than death
The entire Gaza Strip should be emptied and leveled flat, just like in Auschwitz. Let it become a museum, showcasing the capabilities of the State of Israel and dissuading anyone from living in the Gaza Strip. This is what must be done to give them a visual representation.
There are no uninvolved, neither in Khan Yunis nor in Saja'iya. They are all deserving of death. This must be the working assumption. Bombard without mercy from the air! Ground maneuvers only after flattening buildings. Every Gazan who did not heed the IDF's request to leave is a terrorist assistant. And if [President] Biden or any other kind-hearted person has a problem with this working assumption, he is welcome to enter Gaza himself.
Bombard from the air without mercy!! Enough with having mercy on the cruel at such painful costs. Enough with having mercy on 'uninvolved' Gazans. There are no uninvolved. Every Gazan who remains in a place of combat is an assistant to a terrorist organization. Enough! Change tactics. Destroy every place where there are terrorists and terrorist assistants. From the air!! Do not risk soldiers' lives if it is possible to bombard from the air!
The enemy will meet first the bombs of the Air Force, and after that the shells of the tanks and artillery and the scoops of the D9 bulldozers, and finally gunfire of the infantry troops. We will fight the entire strip.
At this very moment, aid trucks continue to enter the Gaza Strip! enough! How long will we bow our heads and endure the shame? That's not how you defeat terrorism. stop everything immediately bring back a total blockade. Return instructions to open fire in the north of the Gaza Strip against all incoming Gazans.
I want the possibility to behead head after head, head after head of the Nukhba.
Our fighters, who went to war ... for revenge for the terrible massacre carried out by the Nazi terrorists ... will return to peace with the hostages, only after they have cut off the foreskins of all these accursed.
One of the options is to drop an atomic bomb on Gaza. I pray & hope for their [hostages] return, but there is also a price in war.
I am saying here to the citizens of Lebanon, I already see the citizens in Gaza walking with white flags along the coast [...] If Hezbollah makes mistakes of this kind, the ones who will pay the price are first of all the citizens of Lebanon. What we are doing in Gaza, we know how to do in Beirut.
What does it mean to harm all the population? There are no innocents! That's exactly it. You're saying now 'population'! There is no population! There are two and a half million terrorist- therefore, warning before bombing is meaningless. Warning has to be for innocents only and since there's no innocent, so, there's no problem. When I said 'they are all terrorists [Interviewer: "What does it mean? Kill everybody?"] This is the perception, that there is something defined in times of war called 'The hour of grace.'
'May your village burn'!! Yes, yes, as far as I'm concerned, it's great morale to wish for Gaza to be erased and set on fire. I have said more than once that revenge is a value. They almost conquered the kibbutzim in the south, slaughtered, raped, beheaded, and gouged out eyes, nearly 1400 murdered in a single Sabbath. So let their village burn. And if 'La Familia' sings this, it's because they understand that the enemy only understands force! And more force.
The Gaza siege plan: impose a total siege on the north of the Gaza Strip, dry up and suffocate the Hamas terrorists in the tunnels until they are forced to come out; create a new security strip 2 km deep into the territory of the Strip along our entire border, a permanent Strip... Imagine bulldozers simply levelling the area; Countries around the world can take in the refugees- only temporarily, of course- until Hamas surrenders and the war ends. Between 6 months and 5 years; In the south of the Gaza Strip … we allow (but do not give ourselves): water, food, medicine ... We aren't allowing any drop of fuel to enter the entire Strip. Without fuel there are no tunnels because there is no ventilation and no lighting... Any country in the world that expresses pain over the situation of the refugees in the south is invited to temporarily host refugees (Scotland, Egypt, Turkey, etc.).
We still have not revenged in a biblical way…we did not burn Gaza to ashes immediately. Create a tremendous humanity crisis. Level the entire area. Do not leave a stone upon stone in Gaza. Gaza needs to turn to Dresden. Annihilate Gaza now!
We will destroy Hamas without mercy - I want revenge. [...] The beach of Gaza will be the blood of terrorists and I am not ashamed to say that.
I would like to say that we, in Israel, at least the population, are not interested in all this rational Palestinian talk. For us, there is one purpose: to destroy Gaza, to destroy this absolute evil. To destroy this. There is no chance that after the holocaust, Jewish people will live similar experiences as they [experienced] 80 years ago.
There is one and only one solution, which is to completely destroy Gaza before invading it. And when I talk about destruction, I mean destruction like it was in Dresden and Hiroshima, without a nuclear weapon.
On the first night, we should have taken down 50,000 Gazans, as a blood revenge. Cabinet discussions later, humanitarian later, prisoners and missing persons later. The first check - blood revenge. This is what Ben Gurion knew.
A leadership that has mercy on monsters who massacred us is not worthy of leadership. A ceasefire for several hours is surrender, it is weakness, humiliation. [...] Without crushing Hamas and razing Gaza, we will not have the right to exist.
If the Prime Minister Netanyahu and his ministers cared about the State of Israel, there would already be 150,000 dead in the Gaza Strip, and not even a single building would be standing in the Strip.
We need to exact a territorial price from (Hamas), including returning Jewish settlements at least to the north of Gaza Strip.
Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.
I don't care about Gaza. I literally don't care at all. They can go out and swim in the sea. I want to see dead bodies of terrorists around Gaza.
Destroy a neighborhood in Gaza every day the abductees are in their hands. If we blink, we run out of global credit. Every day that the abductees are with them, a neighborhood must be destroyed on its inhabitants and I will be called cruel. It is a Middle Eastern language.
We are striking our enemies with unprecedented might. I emphasize that this is only the beginning.
The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.
I have released all restraints.
Five days have passed since Muslims carried out the largest massacre in history of Jews, on the land of Israel, since the establishment of the State of Israel. And still [N]etanyahu refuses to give the moral order to crush and erase the cities of terror from which the murderers of our brothers emerged. Shame!
This [attack] is not enough, there should be more, there should be no limits to the response, I said it a million times, until we see hundreds of thousands fleeing Gaza, we, the IDF has not achieved its mission, this is a phase that should happen, I am saying this cause these are instructions that were said to the IDF [...] I also do not want [the IDF] to get inside [Gaza] before crushing everything, I’d rather the falling of fifty buildings than one more casualty to our forces.
The goal that has been outlined in the IDF is that on the day after the war, every being left in Gaza will understand the price of starting a war with the State of Israel... Throughout the past 24 hours, we have been conducting aerial strikes- destructive aerial operations that include thousands of armaments. To put that in perspective, the pace of the strikes is five times that of the strikes on Hezbollah in the Second Lebanon War. I repeat, five times what it was against Hezbollah in the Second Lebanon War.
Jericho [Nuclear] Missile! Jericho Missile! A strategic alert, before considering the introduction of forces. A doomsday weapon! This is my opinion. May God preserve all our strength.
The goal has been defined - there will be no operational capability left against the State of Israel. In order to achieve the goal, at the tactical level, it cannot happen without the population fleeing.
We need to deal a blow that hasn’t been seen in 50 years and take down Gaza.
All of Gaza’s infrastructures must be destroyed to its foundation and their electricity cut off immediately. The war is not against Hamas but against the state of Gaza.
We will avenge with great force the black day they have inflicted upon the State of Israel and its citizens. As Biyalik said: revenge for the blood of a little child has yet been devised by Satan.
I don’t know why it’s so hard for us to define reality with the simple words that language puts at our disposal. Why do we have to make up a new name for the war every other week, just to avoid calling it by its name. What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy? Every war is between two peoples, and in every war the people who started the war, that whole people, is the enemy. A declaration of war is not a war crime. Responding with war certainly is not. Nor is the use of the word 'war', nor a clear definition who the enemy is. Au contraire: the morality of war (yes, there is such a thing) is founded on the assumption that there are wars in this world, and that war is not the normal state of things, and that in wars the enemy is usually an entire people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.
The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages. Only then will Israel be calm for forty years.
With an outbreak of hostilities, the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy's actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes. The strike must be carried out as quickly as possible, and must prioritize damaging assets over seeking out each and every launcher.
Punishment must be aimed at decision makers and the power elite. In Syria, punishment should clearly be aimed at the Syrian military, the Syrian regime, and the Syrian state structure. In Lebanon, attacks should both aim at Hizbollah’s military capabilities and should target economic interests and the centers of civilian power that support the organization. Moreover, the closer the relationship between Hizbollah and the Lebanese government, the more the elements of the Lebanese state infrastructure should be targeted. Such a response will create a lasting memory among Syrian and Lebanese decision makers, thereby increasing Israeli deterrence and reducing the likelihood of hostilities against Israel for a an extended period. At the same time, it will force Syria, Hizbollah, and Lebanon to commit to lengthy and resource-intensive reconstruction programs.
This approach is applicable to the Gaza Strip as well. There, the IDF will be required to strike hard at Hamas and to refrain from the cat and mouse games of searching for Qassam rocket launchers. The IDF should not be expected to stop the rocket and missile fire against the Israeli home front through attacks on the launchers themselves, but by means of imposing a ceasefire on the enemy.
The IDF should decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it.
You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes.
What is necessary is cruel and strong reactions. We need precision in time, place, and casualties. If we know the family, we must strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise, the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action, there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent.
We shoot at those from among the 200,000 hungry Arabs who cross the line [to graze their flocks]...Arabs cross to collect the grain that they left in the abandoned villages and we set mines for them and they go back without an arm or a leg. [It may be that this] cannot pass review, but I know no other method of guarding the borders.
Hamas is not the enemy, but Gaza is the enemy. [...] It is not important who you warn, or who evacuates a neighborhood. This is what is called flattening the area, leveling the ground. You ask me what I would do? The answer is simply leveling the ground, and to kill the largest number possible. Because the woman is an enemy, the baby is an enemy, and the first grader is an enemy. The Hamas militant is an enemy and the pregnant woman is an enemy. We see it with our own eyes.
Before we try to act naive, and talk about journalists who got hurt - no one's hurt for no reason. Anyone who's in a shooting zone is hit because he needs to get hit, because he's a target of IDF
I want to move on to one point, speaking of Gaza, speaking of Lebanon, and other places we'll occupy in the future. Since we want to maintain equilibrium as a developed country, punishment as a strategy should be the main element. In punishment you have room to maneuver, you decide whether you slap them once or twice, in front or from behind, whether to strike property or leaders, but the main objective of units in the field is to kill the enemy. Before he makes contact, while he makes contact, and then when he retreats. That's the most important thing. Quantity is more important than quality. One mistake the [Israeli] Army makes is judging each case individually, whether the person deserves to die or not. Most of these people [Gazans, Palestinians, Lebanese, Arabs] were born to die, we just have to help them.
By instilling proper expectations of the IDF response among the civilian population, Israel will be able to improve its readiness and the resilience of its citizens. Still, the IDF’s primary goal must nonetheless be to attain a ceasefire under conditions that will increase Israel's long term deterrence, prevent a war of attrition, and leave the enemy floundering in expensive, long term processes of reconstruction.
In the next war, if we do it right, we’ll have a chance to get all the Arabs out ... We can clear the West Bank, sort out Jerusalem.
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