Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/WASHINGTON: The United States has asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to repudiate a call from his hardline Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to “erase a Palestinian village.”
Smotrich, the head of the pro-settler party in Netanyahu’s nationalist-religious coalition, made the comments at a conference amid a spate of deadly Palestinian attacks and Israel’s retaliatory violence in the occupied West Bank. Asked about the weekend settler rampage through the Palestinian village of Huwara, which the Israeli general described Tuesday as a “pogrom,” Smotrich said: “I think that Huwara needs to be erased.” Smotrich said: “I think the state of Israel needs to do it, but God forbid not an individual citizen.”
US’s stance
United States Department spokesperson Ned Price called Smotrich’s comments “irresponsible,” “disgusting,” and “repugnant.” “We call on Netanyahu and other Israeli officials to publicly and clearly deny and disavow these comments.”
The Palestinian government welcomed the United State Department’s response. The unusually forthright reaction from Washington underlined the increasing global alarm at the escalating assault in the West Bank, where three Israelis were killed, and a Palestinian was martyred in two days of bloodshed earlier in the week.
