How about President Herzog? who declared on October 17:
"It is an entire nation out there that is responsible," Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. "It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It's absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d'état."
The below is excerpted from this article, which does a nice job of summing up some other prime examples:
An Israeli lawmaker from the ruling Likud party doubled down on comments he made last month that Gaza should be "burned now", stating that there were no innocent people left there.
According to a report in Haaretz on Wednesday, Nissim Vaturi said he did not see anything wrong with his previous statements and stood by them.
"It is better to burn, to bring down buildings than for soldiers to be hurt," the parliamentarian said during an interview with Israel's Kol Barama radio station on Wednesday.
He claimed that everyone in the northern Gaza Strip had been evacuated in an "orderly" fashion.
Israel has forcibly displaced nearly 1.9 million people in Gaza since war broke out on 7 October. Many Palestinians were killed while raising white flags and fleeing on roads designated by Israel as safe.
"I don't think there are any innocents there now, not now and not when I said those things," Vaturi said.
Vaturi’s statements were not the first inflammatory comments made by MPs and ministers belonging to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party since the Gaza war began.
String of inflammatory comments
In the first few days of the conflict, Likud MP Revital "Tally" Gotliv urged the Israeli army to use a “Doomsday weapon” in Gaza, in what was widely thought to be referring to nuclear weapons.
“I urge you to do everything and use Doomsday weapons fearlessly against our enemies,” Gotliv wrote on social media platform X, calling upon Israel to use “everything in its arsenal”.
In November, Galit Distel Atbaryan, Israel's former public diplomacy minister, called for Gaza to be “erased from the face of the Earth”, stating that the besieged enclave should be “wiped out” by a “vengeful and vicious” Israeli army.
After being shown a video of the 7 October attacks carried out by Palestinian fighters on southern Israeli communities, Distel Atbaryan posted on Facebook urging Israelis to invest their energy on Gaza’s “monsters”, forcibly expelling them into Egypt or just “let[ting] them die”.
Days later, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu floated the possibility of resorting to nuclear weapons in Gaza. When asked during a radio interview with Kol Barama about a hypothetical nuclear option in the war, he responded: “That’s one way.”
