The impunity granted to Israel is as shocking as its violence

More incitement to violence from Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir exposes how colonial violence is aimed at the entire colonised population. Speaking on a podcast with former Israeli hostage Rom Braslavski, Ben Gvir said that Israeli forced should kill 30-40 Palestinians each night in Gaza. 

Braslavski requested to act as executioner should Ben Gvir’s plan come to pass, to which the security minister replied, “I will turn the world upside down to make that happen. I promise you that I will do everything I can and turn the world upside down until it happens.”

As shocking as the comments are, both are the product of an enterprise that knows it can only sustain itself through ethnic cleansing.

In 2025, a poll by the Hebrew University Centre showed that 87 per cent of the Israeli government’s supporters perceived “no innocents’ in Gaza, while 64 per cent of Israelis held the same view.

Israel’s Channel 14 branded all Palestinians killed during the genocide as terrorists. Among settlers that normalise the killings of Palestinians, and which even glorifies those murdering them, Ben Gvir’s comments are unlikely to elicit any lingering shock. On the contrary, Ben Gvir’s wish for extrajudicial killings may well find willing participants. And while Gaza remains within reach of the Israeli military in terms of extrajudicial assassinations, the occupied West Bank faces both Israeli institutions and settlers.

READ: Extremist Israeli minister says “30 to 40” Gazans should be killed every day

Ben Gvir’s comments were aimed at Gaza, but Israel’s colonisation plans do not only include Gaza. The occupied West Bank, which faces daily violence from settlers, is much at risk from extrajudicial killings. In Ras al-Ain, south of Nablus, Israeli settlers besieged Palestinian families and cut off their electricity, water and food supplies. While attracting international attention, the UN as usual preferred to rely on its usual condemnations while Erika Guevara Ross, Amnesty International Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns, described the siege as “an accelerating and well-documented pattern of coordinated and strategic settler terror, enabled, backed and funded by the State of Israel.” True, but what is being done with the information that is already mainstream knowledge to the rest of the world?

Likewise, Ben Gvir’s comments have not prompted a reckoning with world leaders or international institutions. Israel has already internalised such thinking – it thrives upon creating victims to sustain itself. The international community, supposedly a reference for human rights under the UN, does not seem to consider Ben Gvir’s threats dangerous enough. Even though Israel has a proven history of torturing and killing Palestinians. 

Killing 30-40 Palestinians per night is not merely a fantasy. It has already been carried out by the Israeli military during the genocide; also exceeding that quota. Ben Gvir has also found someone willing to carry out the assassinations, even on a much larger scale. For Israel, as Ben Gvir again elucidated, Palestinians “are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”

If, according to Ben Gvir, killing Palestinians is killing non-people, then Israel is already completely absolved of culpability. This is the type of impunity the UN is harvesting for Israel. 

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.