Video: Israeli Extremist Rabbis Instruct Soldiers Heading to Gaza: ‘Kill All Their Children’
While many tens of thousands of Jews reject Zionism altogether,
fundamentalist rabbis openly calling for the genocide of Palestinians,
including children, are not as rare as one would hope, nor is their influence.
Behind ghastly reports of thousands of children being targeted for assassination, starvation and death by the Israeli army during its genocidal attack upon over two million Palestinians in Gaza, is an ideology which most Westerners may find difficult to believe: rabbis of extremist Jewish Zionist sects who counsel and even demand Israeli soldiers target and kill all the children, women, and men in the Gaza Strip.
“The basic law in a religious war, and in this case in Gaza, is ‘do not spare any soul,’” instructed Rabbi Eliyahu Mali in March of last year. “The logic of this is very clear: if you don’t kill them, they will attempt to kill you.”
Mali was lecturing a group of students enrolled in his Jaffa-based academy which combines studies of religious texts with Israeli military service. “Today’s terrorists are the children of the prior [military] operation that left them alive. The women are essentially the ones who are producing the terrorists,” he proposed.
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— Warfare Analysis (@warfareanalysis) February 23, 2025
Rabbi Eliyahu Mali
“The Torah does not allow you to let every soul live” “The terrorists of today are the children of the past.”
Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, head of a Jewish religious school in occupied Yafa, urged his IDF students during a lesson he gave on Friday 1 Mars 2024,to… pic.twitter.com/DNKRz0Racg
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— Warfare Analysis (@warfareanalysis) February 23, 2025
Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv admitted to personally destroying 50 Palestinian families homes every week in Rafah and Jabalia. pic.twitter.com/Z593po9rSr
“It’s either you or them. And in reality, ‘do not spare any soul’ is based on the doctrine that says, ‘he who comes to kill you in the afternoon, kill him in the morning’” (Babylonian Talmud), he continued. “And the one who ‘comes to kill you’ here, in the broad sense, is not the person who is 18, 16, 20, 30 years old, the one who pointed his weapon at you, but also the next generation, and also those who give birth to the next generation, because in reality there is no difference.”
In response to a student’s inquiry regarding how he relates this directive to the elderly, Mali said “there is no such thing as an innocent creature by the way, the elderly man is capable of carrying a rifle and shooting. Therefore, the Torah concept is very clear in the ruling.”
When asked, “children too should be killed?” the rabbi replied, “the same thing and that’s because you can’t be clever with the Torah. When the Torah says, ‘do not spare any soul’ then you must not spare any soul.”
“Today he is a youth and tomorrow he is a fighter. The fighters, or those whom we call saboteurs, who are 18 years old today, were eight years old in the previous war,” he said. “Therefore, you must not stop [killing].”
Rabbi: ‘no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians’
While many tens of thousands of Jews reject Zionism altogether, at least some even calling the militant religious movement “satanic,” as many thousands more wholly reject Israel’s present “sadistic” genocide as well, such fundamentalist views—as expressed by Mali—are not as rare as one would hope, nor their influence.
Indeed, as articulated by Israeli historian Benny Morris, the notion of expelling all the Palestinians from their land “is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century.”
And in the late 1930s, David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, stated that such expulsions of the native population would require “brutal compulsion,” which was first exercised during the Nakba of 1948 when the Israeli army compelled more than 700,000 Palestinians to flee for their lives abandoning their homes, lands, and livelihoods while barring their return.
Serving to form the types of soldiers who may be willing to execute such objectives, which violate fundamental common-sense morality, a “rabbinical” imprimatur of certain violent strands of religious Zionism have been employed for some time.
Whether it is a rabbi’s obscenely unjust demand that a West Bank town be “wiped off the face of the earth” in 1988, or a high ranking former Chief Rabbi advising the nation’s prime minster that “there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians” during a potential military offensive on Gaza in 2007, such violent extremism has fostered unconscionable atrocities in the region for 77 years.
‘The Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children’
In 2009, Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Manis Friedman articulated the same principles as Mali when asked how Jews in Israel should treat their Arab neighbors.
“I don’t believe in Western morality,” he wrote. “The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).”
After receiving significant criticism, Friedman, a high-profile best-selling author from Minnesota, backtracked from the statement claiming such measures could only be done in “self-defense.”
However, at least one Jewish critic of the Chabad movement, Shmarya Rosenberg, said at the time, “What he’s saying is the standard normal view of a Chabadnik… They just don’t say it in public.”
Behind closed doors, teaching young soon-to-be Israeli soldiers in 2018, another rabbi named Ophir Wallas instructed that as Jews they were permitted to wipe out the Palestinian people, “all of them,” in order to take their land. And only fear of a massive international retaliation prevented such a course of action, until, apparently, a more opportune time.
‘Ruler of Israel’ rabbi promotes genocide, ethnic cleansing: ‘Kill all their children’
In 2010, extreme religious Zionist rabbis associated with the Kach movement, founded by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, published a book titled The King’s Torah which sought to provide a type of religious justification for genocidal atrocities against Palestinian civilians, including children.
In the text, which an Israeli tabloid described as a manual for “Jewish terror,” co-author rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur wrote that the 5th Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Murder,” applies only “to a Jew who kills a Jew.” The book also sanctions the killing of non-Jews, including the children and babies of Israel’s enemies since “it is clear that they will grow to harm us.”
Without describing how he knows the future of non-Jewish children, Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi of New York State explains this notion, “Do not have mercy on the children. Kill all their children also. Why? There’s no difference between them and their children. In ten years from now, these children will attack you on the way.”
Prominent Israeli settler Rabbi Dov Lior, who is described by Middle East Eye as the spiritual leader of Israel’s entire extremist Religious Zionism political coalition that became part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s present government in 2022, provided written support for The King’s Torah in 2011.
One of Lior’s disciples, Baruch Goldstein, also murdered 29 innocent Palestinians at a mosque in Hebron in 1994. The senior rabbi, whose influence is so prominent he has been dubbed the “Ruler of Israel,” lauded Goldstein afterwards as “holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust.”
During Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2014, Lior issued a religious ruling which appears prophetic. The rabbi’s pronouncement asserted it was morally permissible for Israel to destroy the entire Gaza Strip, including the extermination of the civilian population.
Israel is “permitted to punish the enemy population with whatever measures it deems proper, like blocking supplies or electricity. It may bomb the entire area,” he wrote, adding that “deterrent measures to exterminate the enemy” were allowed.
Following statements of outrage from more moderate leaders at the time, Lior doubled down later that year reasserting Ben-Gurion’s earlier stated Zionist goal to ethnically cleanse all the Palestinians from the land saying the region must be “clean of Arabs.”
After a criticism of Lior from a member of the Knesset in 2013, an advertisement appeared in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz with a laudatory statement of support for “the great Rabbi Lior,” calling him a “teacher of tens of thousands” and attacking his critics in the Knesset. The statement was signed by “105 important rabbis.”
Radical religious Zionists begin to take power in Israel
Hence, the extremist racist Kach movement, which advocates for the violent expulsion of the Palestinian people from their internationally recognized lands, has been showing steady political growth from its early existence when it was considered fringe and even designated a terrorist organization by the State of Israel in 1994.
As more radical Zionist settlers have immigrated to Israel, the sentiments of this ideology increasingly surfaced among political leaders including members of the Knesset. In 2014, Israel’s justice minister Ayelet Shaked made headlines describing the entire Palestinian population as “the enemy” and called for an all-out genocidal war against them.
In 2018, during a non-violent demonstration of Gazans, where Israeli snipers shot and killed 183 people, including the intentional targeting of children, injuring at least 1,600 more Palestinians, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman defended his army’s actions stating there are “no innocent people in Gaza,” relegating the entire civilian population to legitimate military targets.
Rabbi: Christians ‘blood sucking vampires,’ churches should be torched
By 2022, the Kach movement appeared to cross a new threshold of power when one of its former participants, Knesset member Itamar Ben-Gvir, joined Netanyahu’s coalition government and assumed the office of the nation’s Minister of National Security, despite having been convicted in the past for at least eight charges including supporting a terrorist organization which initiates violent racist attacks against Palestinians.
While his spiritual inspiration, Rabbi Meir Kahane, referred to Palestinians as “dogs” who “must sit quietly or get the hell out,” Ben-Gvir also displayed a portrait of the mass-murdering Jewish terrorist Goldstein in his home until he entered politics. He is also quoted as considering Kahane to be a “saint.”
At a 2022 memorial service for Kahane, the soon-to-be Minister of National Security at the time shared a podium with Rabbi Lior and others, including Rabbi Bentzi Gopstein who has called Christians “blood sucking vampires,” demanded their expulsion from the Holy Land and advocated for the burning of churches.
Joining Netanyahu’s coalition as well was another resident of an illegal West Bank settlement, Religious Zionism party leader Bezalel Smotrich, who became Minister of Finance. He has proclaimed that his “life’s mission” is to defy the will of the overwhelming number of national governments in the world by thwarting the two-state solution, providing Palestinians with three options: “residency with no right to vote,” migration or death.
Radical rabbinical influence upon Israeli politicians confirmed following Oct. 7 attack
Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas break-out attack upon Israeli-held territory outside the Gaza Strip, the seeming undercurrent of such genocidal views swiftly emerged among an array of Israeli political leaders. On one occasion, Smotrich asserted out loud that it would be “right and moral” to starve the two million Palestinians (1 million children) in Gaza “to death.”
In fact, right off the bat when this genocidal campaign began Defense Minister Yoav Gallant committed an international war crime ordering “a complete siege on Gaza… There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
One month later, proposing a justification for this genocide, Rabbi Meir Maroz reasserted this dehumanization saying “If they [people of Gaza] were humans, we would have sent them humanitarian aid…but this is about animals.”
Rabbi Meir Maroz to Israeli Channel 7: “If they [people of Gaza] were humans, we would have sent them humanitarian aid...but this is about animals.” pic.twitter.com/RRouT67ZzX
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) November 11, 2023
Netanyahu also infamously evoked a biblical analogy referring to the Hebrew’s enemies which was widely interpreted as a genocidal call to destroy the Palestinian people in Gaza. “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible – we do remember,” he said during an official video statement.
Israeli president Isaac Herzog asserted, “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza…It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” Knesset member Tally Goltiv demanded, “Bring down the buildings! Bomb without distinction!!… Without mercy!”
“These are animals, they have no right to exist,” said Israeli education minister Yoav Kisch. “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.”
“Erase Gaza. Nothing else will satisfy us,” said Knesset Deputy Speaker Nissim Vaturi. “Do not leave a child there[,] expel anyone who remains there when it ends, so that they won’t re-establish.”
Very many more genocidal statements from Israeli leaders were documented in numerous official reports demonstrating positive intent for the nation to commit genocide, the worst of all international crimes. This crime was defined by the Genocide Convention of 1948 of which Israel remains a signatory.
INFOGRAHPH| Statements made by Israeli officials indicating their clear intent to annihilate Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as a whole.
— Euro-Med Monitor (@EuroMedHR) October 20, 2024
📄Read Euro-Med Monitor's report, De-Gaza, on one year of Israel's genocide⤵️https://t.co/rnXLJ4R1ts pic.twitter.com/zUvCr2iCm9
Soldiers formed by radical rabbis, thousands of children ‘sniper shot,’ ‘incinerated,’ ‘shredded,’ ‘crushed by buildings’
The influence of this radical violent rabbinic interpretation of the Torah has also naturally made its impact in both the Israeli military and the broader national population as well.
Due in part to the establishment of pre-military academies (mechinot) like Mali’s where students are taken through certain courses in religion utilizing the Torah and Talmud (Hesder program), a disproportionate number of combat troops and officers in the Israeli army identify as religious Zionists.
Despite only accounting for 12 to 14% of the broader Jewish Israeli population, religious Zionists make up around 40% of graduates from the Israeli army’s infantry schools. This is an approximately 15-fold increase since the early 1990s when this number was only 2.5%, much lower than Jewish Israelis who came from secular backgrounds. It is further reported that 88% of Hesder graduates serve in combat roles, compared to a 30% national average.
Given the types of training evidently received in these Hesder programs, that soldiers should not “spare any soul,” and “kill men, women and children,” perhaps it should not be surprising when last July forty-five American physicians, surgeons and nurses—who had volunteered in Gaza since October 2023—wrote in a letter addressed to Joe Biden that “every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest.”
“No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by ‘the world’s best sniper,’” commented one of the letter’s signatories, Dr. Mark Perlmutter. In his testimony he stated that all the disasters he had seen over thirty years and 40 medical mission trips, combined, did not “equal the level of carnage” he saw “against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.”
The North Carolina-based physician further stated that the victims of such carnage are “almost exclusively children.” His testimony includes seeing scores of children “incinerated,” “shredded,” “missing body parts,” and “being crushed by buildings,” with other accounts confirming deaths by starvation.
Reliable reports of Palestinian deaths since October 7, 2023 include at least 48,388 killed in Gaza, approximately 14,564 children, with 111,803 injured, and more than 10,000 children who have lost at least one leg. These numbers do not include approximately 11,000 individuals who are missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
According to a rationale presented in a Lancet study last July, one can conservatively estimate total deaths, including indirect fatalities due to causes like starvation, lack of medicine or proper medical care to include 241,940 (106,453 children).
Broader Jewish Israeli population in general agreement with radical rabbis’ agenda
With religious Zionist settlers and their children participating directly in the blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza as an attempt to starve its 2 million people to death, polls have shown over this period that the broader Israeli population is in general agreement with them in their desire to exterminate Gaza’s population, 70% of whom are regarded as refugees according to the UN, having survived previous violent displacements by the Israelis in 1948 and 1967.
Despite Israel’s horrendous bombing in the Gaza Strip, with the world being inundated with images of entire neighborhoods destroyed, men lifting the corpses of their bloodied and broken children from the rubble, and dirty frantic hospitals treating patients with missing limbs, one late October 2023 Tel Aviv University poll found that 58 percent of Israeli Jews said the army was using too little firepower in its assault on Gaza, and less than 2 percent said it was too much.
Another poll conducted in December 2023 asked, “To what extent should Israel take into consideration the suffering of the civilian population in Gaza when planning the continuation of the fighting there?” Over 80 percent of Jewish Israelis answered, “to a very small extent” or “to a fairly small extent” (40 and 41 percent respectively).
Additionally, in January, 2024, an Israeli Channel 12 poll found that 72% of Israelis believe humanitarian aid to the 2 million Gazan civilians, including 1 million children, “must be stopped until the Israeli prisoners are released” by Hamas.
Equivalent of five atomic bombs dropped on Gaza with citizens’ approval, Israel a ‘satanic state’
By April, Israel had dropped over 70,000 tons of explosives on Gaza surpassing the tonnage dropped during World War II on Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined. These attacks have damaged or destroyed an estimated 69% of structures in Gaza including at least 245,000 homes.
Furthermore, the explosive capacity of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki equated to around 15,000 tons of TNT each which means Israel had already dropped the equivalent of almost 5 atomic bombs in Gaza by this time.
Yet even as this massive destruction and astronomical death toll was compounding every day, a May 2024 Pew Research survey found comparable numbers to previous polls with 34% of Israeli respondents still saying Israel’s military response against the Palestinians in Gaza had not gone far enough, 39% saying it had been about right, and only 19% believing it had gone too far.
Finally, last month, President Donald Trump surprised the world when during a press conference with Netanyahu he announced his plan for the United States to “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip turning it into a large beach resort. This plan included the president’s intent to “permanently” ethnically cleanse two million Palestinians from their internationally recognized native territory, thus fulfilling this long-time Zionist goal of mass expulsion, a serious war crime.
Despite the plan’s overwhelming rejection by virtually the entire rest of the world, a February poll of Israeli adults conducted by the local Channel 12 found that a full 68% of respondents supported Trump’s criminal ethnic cleansing plan, while 20% opposed it with 12% saying they were unsure.
In reflecting not only on the Israeli leadership’s statements supporting genocidal ends in Gaza and the operations of the Israeli army executing such objectives, but also on the high levels of support for genocide among the nation’s citizens, Jewish Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein reluctantly concluded over a year ago that Israel is “a satanic state.”
Views of radical Zionist sects normative for significant swaths of Jewish diaspora?
While the rantings of extremist rabbis such as Mali, Friedman, Wallace and Lior have often been dismissed as fringe perspectives that have little influence, the resulting impact of these fundamentalist Jewish Zionist sects cannot be overestimated. These horrendous effects on Israel’s general population, military, and political leaders have come into great relief since October 7, 2023, for the whole world to see.
And these pervasive ideas seem to hold sway in the Jewish diaspora as well. Citing one recent example, a prominent St. Louis, Missouri Chief Rabbi named Jeffrey Abraham was called out earlier this month for a social media post where he asserted there are “no ‘innocent civilians’ in Gaza,” “all the people in Gaza are Hamas” and agreed with the dehumanizing statement that Gazans are “Animals. Period. Full stop.”
“It is this kind of dehumanizing rhetoric that the Nazis used to justify the mass murder of the Jews of Europe in the 1940s and Hutu militias used to justify the mass murder of Tutsis in Rwanda in the 1990s,” wrote local resident Michael Berg. “And now here the language is being used in St. Louis to justify the mass murder of Palestinians.”
Berg went on to criticize several Jewish organizations who refrained from taking issue with Abraham, also stating that not a single St. Louis rabbi issued a statement against it. “One can only conclude that those who consider themselves the leaders of the establishment Jewish community support Abraham’s genocidal ideas, or at least consider them part of the acceptable range of official Jewish views,” he concluded.
Media double-standard: Characterize Palestinians with one obsolete phrase while simultaneously ignoring plethora of genocidal directives from Israeli leaders
While one severely antisemitic reference was included in the original 1988 Hamas charter, calling for Muslims to “fight the Jews (kill the Jews),” the organization’s 2017 Charter revision effectively disowned this language and rather clarified:
Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
Though Zionist public relations strategies emphasize using the single obsolete passage from the earlier charter as propaganda “gold,” repeating it “again and again” in the western media to engender sympathy from their Western audiences, it may be useful to consider the contrast and ask a question.
As the Israeli military is apparently targeting children, women and the elderly for death in the Gaza Strip, with the zealous support of their Jewish Zionist population, the emphatic voices of their political leaders and specific encouragement—with spiritual sanction—from high numbers of their rabbinic leaders, legacy media organizations just may wish to consider whether such calls for the genocidal death of tens of thousands of children may be worthy of a bit more media coverage especially for American taxpayers who have been forced to underwrite these crimes.
In the meantime, President Trump approved a $3 billion weapons transfer to Israel on February 28, Israel resumed its full blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza on March 5 and on Tuesday the IDF restarted its large-scale bombing of displaced families, killing at least 404 Palestinians, including 174 children, 89 women and 32 seniors.
American taxpayers who provided Trump a mandate to be a “peacemaker” may rightly be asking how these policies “Make America Great Again.”
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