Israel's politicians have increased their threats against the lives of Iran's leaders and compared Tehran's rulers to Nazis after a missile hit a hospital in southern Israel.
The growing campaign to stigmatise a regime, which has threatened genocide against Israel, is being matched by popular support for the mass removal of Palestinians from their lands.
Itamar Ben Gvir, an Israeli minister and extreme rightist, said: “If the Nazis [in Iran] who launch missiles at hospitals, at the elderly and at children had atomic weapons, they would fire them in a heartbeat without even thinking. This is the most just campaign that Israel has ever embarked on in history."
The same minister is an open advocate of driving Palestinians out of Gaza, where the IDF has conducted relentless waves of airstrikes against medical facilities often claiming they have been used as military bases by Hamas. He is under sanctions imposed by the UK recently.
Once seen as a dangerous extremist who drew much of his ideology from the philosophy of the banned Kach terrorist movement, Mr Ben Gvir has seen an explosion of support for his demands that Gaza’s 2.5 million people be driven out of the enclave.
Some 82 per cent of Israeli Jews support the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. And 54 per cent strongly support this. The poll asked about 1,000 Jewish Israelis if they supported the idea that all the people in towns conquered by Israel should be killed – in the same way that Jericho was flattened in the bible – 47 per cent backed the idea of mass slaughter.
This latest poll, by Pennsylvania State University, shows a higher level of support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza than some others. Israel’s leading polls analyst Dahlia Sheindlin noted that the aChord polling organisation found 60 per cent backing for the idea of mass expulsions from Gaza.
Pen State’s poll was conducted in March – long before the Israeli attacks on Iran and the retaliation missile strikes across the Jewish state.
About a week into the Israeli campaign the IDF says that it has destroyed two-thirds of Iran’s missile sites, dominates the air space over Iran, and continues to smash its capacity to build nuclear weapons.
But on Wednesday and Thursday Israelis were surprised, and terrified, to learn that Iran’s Fatah-1 missile had been in action and some had evaded Israel’s air defences. This may be because some have multiple warheads, or that the warheads themselves have the capacity to weave and jink through the air to avoid Israel’s Arrow 2 and 3 air defence systems.
Israel Katz, the Israeli defence minister, said that Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "is the modern-day Hitler” after an Iranian missile struck the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. There is an IDF installation close by and the hospital is known to be an important medical facility for treating Israeli soldiers who have been wounded in Gaza.
Mr Katz said the supreme leader is “a man who has led a major power for decades, yet openly calls for the destruction of Israel and uses all resources at the expense of his own people”.
Israel has frequently accused Hamas of using hospitals and schools as human shields to explain the spiralling casualty figures from airstrikes in Gaza, where at least 69 people were killed in the last 24 hours.
Central Tel Aviv, where the IDF headquarters sits across a city block, has been targeted by Iran and is surrounded by schools. Just as the UK's own MoD is in central London, near schools and parliament itself.
But Iran’s leaders have repeatedly called for Israel’s annihilation. And, allegedly, Tehran is getting close to producing a nuclear bomb inside a year.
The Iranian civilian death toll is no longer released officially after it rose above 220. In Israel, 24 people are reported to have been killed and hundreds injured.
But as Israelis are frequently called a “cancer” by Iranian leaders and Israelis call those leaders Nazis, the rhetorical space for more bloodletting and even atrocities grows.
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