Israel’s finance minister at the weekend said he had chosen his words poorly when he called for a Palestinian town to be “wiped out” after two Israeli settlers were killed there.
The young settlers were shot dead on February 26 in their car in Huwara, a northern town in the West Bank, sparking attacks by Israeli settlers on the Palestinian town.
“I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out,” Bezalel Smotrich, head of the far-right Religious Zionism party and a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, had said on Wednesday.
“It is possible that the word was wrong,” Mr Smotrich told local television on Saturday.
“I did not mean harm to innocents when I said that Huwara should be wiped out.”
Mr Smotrich’s comments had drawn international condemnation, with UN human rights chief Volker Turk denouncing them as “an unfathomable statement of incitement to violence and hostility”.
Washington, a staunch ally of Israel, was even more blunt in its response to the comments. “They were irresponsible, repugnant, they were disgusting,” US State Department spokesman said.
Read the article in The Australian (AFP).