Wartime rhetoric is recipe for more regional violence

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.

- SAM KILEY

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.