Genocide and Israel’s Defense Ministers: From “Human Animals” to “Terror Nests” and Endless Vengeance

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Largely overlooked amongst the grotesque collection of messianic, supremacist enthusiasts for genocide who make up the leadership of the State of Israel — in particular, of course, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the two far-right ministers in his coalition government, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — is the figure of Israel Katz, a longtime “hardliner” and ally of Netanyahu who was appointed as the defense minister in November 2024 after Netanyahu sacked his predecessor Yoav Gallant.

Now 70 years of age, Katz first emerged publicly as a far-right student agitator at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1980s, opposing what he saw as “Arab students’ campus violence”, when he was suspended for a year for tying the university’s rector, the renowned chemist Raphael Mechoulam, to a chair using a rope. A former solder, whose parents were Holocaust survivors from Romania, he has been a member of the Knesset since 1998, and had held numerous ministerial positions, mostly under Netanyahu, since 2003.

Israel Katz as the epitome of relentless genocidal intent

For the last 18 months, Katz has been the epitome of relentless genocidal intent. In a statement issued after his appointment, he spoke of his intention to secure “victory over our enemies and to achieve the goals of the war: the return of all hostages as the most important moral mission, the destruction of Hamas in Gaza, the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the containment of Iranian aggression, and the safe return of the residents of the north and south [of Israel] to their homes.”

In his rhetoric, he is obsessed with describing those resisting Israel’s relentless genocidal fury as constituting “nests of terror.” In January 2025, he said, “The IDF will intensify its activities against the terrorist nests in Gaza until the release of the hostages and the elimination of Hamas”, and, that same month, while spearheading mass expulsions and demolitions in the West Bank, with 40,000 Palestinians driven from their homes, he said that the IDF was “clearing the ‘nests of terror’ of terrorists and destroying infrastructure and weapons ‘on an extensive scale’”, and pledged that the IDF would stay in the cleared areas for at least a year.

In an insanely hysterical statement, he said, “We will not return to the reality that was in the past. We will continue to clear refugee camps and other terror centers to dismantle the battalions and terror infrastructure of the extreme Islam that was built, armed, funded and supported by the Iranian evil axis, in an attempt to establish an eastern terror front.”

When, in March 2025, Israel shamefully broke the ceasefire in Gaza that had begun six weeks before, and unforgivably began a renewed seven-month orgy of destruction and extermination until Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan” halted the relentless military hostility in October 2025, Katz was deeply involved in the operations, and stated, just before extraordinarily violent airstrikes were launched in mid-March, that “the gates of hell will open in Gaza” and that Hamas would be hit with a force it has “never seen before” if it did not release all the remaining Israeli hostages.

In March 2025, Katz was also deeply implicated in a Security Cabinet decision involving “preparation for the possibility of voluntary departure of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to third countries”, after which a “Voluntary Emigration Administration” was established within the Defense Ministry.

More recently, just before the US’s ill-advised war on Iran began, at Israel’s prompting, Katz, whose genocidal intent towards the Lebanese people is just as horrific as his hatred for the Palestinians, stated that Israel will occupy parts of Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza permanently, and stay inside the West Bank refugee camps ‘in place of the residents’”, at a graduation ceremony for Israeli combat officers.

In his speech, translated by the anti-Zionist Israeli activist B.M., he summed up his multi-front enthusiasm for perpetual war by saying, “Dear graduates, you are the successors of King David and his army commander Joab son of Zeruiah, who struck the Philistines and the Moabites, the Arameans and the Ammonites, and established the Kingdom of Israel. The policy today is one of initiative, decisive victory, removing threats, and defending the borders and Israeli communities from within enemy territory, in the Galilee from the mountain ridges in Lebanon, in the Golan Heights from the summit of Mount Hermon and the security zone in Syria, in the communities of the western Negev with a permanent IDF presence, in a security zone inside Gaza that will continue forever, and in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] with an IDF presence inside the refugee camps in northern Samaria in place of the residents and the Palestinian terror nests that were there.”

At the end of March, he reiterated his position regarding Lebanon, saying that Israel would permanently occupy southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, 30 km north of Israel, and that every house in all the Lebanese villages near the Israeli border would be demolished — a mission that those under his command have been undertaking diligently, even though Haaretz reported just last week that the operations have descended into unprincipled chaos and what Haaretz called “moral decay.” One soldier who spoke to the newspaper said, “The feeling is that the IDF has become like an army of Vikings — they let soldiers loot so they’ll be happy and keep fighting.”

Yoav Gallant v. Benjamin Netanyahu

To understand the dynamics at play in Israel’s top power structures, it’s salutary to review Gallant’s sacking, and his replacement by Israel Katz. When Netanyahu sacked Gallant in November 2024, he stated, “In the midst of a war, more than ever, full trust is required between the prime minister and the minister of defence.” He added, as the BBC described it, that, “although there had been trust and ‘fruitful work’ in the first months of the war, ‘during the last months this trust cracked.’” Specifically, Netanyahu stated that “significant gaps were discovered between me and Gallant in the management of the campaign”, which were “accompanied by statements and actions that contradict the decisions of the government.”

Before looking into these “significant gaps”, it’s worth noting that the sacking in November 2024 was not the first time that Netanyahu had sacked Gallant.

In March 2023, he sacked Gallant for opposing his reviled plans for judicial reform, but reinstated him after a massive public backlash. The plans, as the BBC described them, would have given the government “decisive control over the committee which appoints judges”, and would also have made it “harder for courts to remove a leader deemed unfit for office”, which “angered many who consider it in the interests” of Netanyahu, “who faces an ongoing trial for corruption.”

Gallant, who was opposed to the changes, voiced the anger and disappointment of members of the IDF, who, he said, were “angry and disappointed.” In one protest, fighter pilots in an elite Israeli Air Force squadron refused to attend training, with one unnamed pilot telling the Ynet news website that the squadron was “signalling that we won’t be prepared to serve a dictatorial regime.”

Netanyahu eventually bowed to pressure and dropped his plans, and the massive opposition to his unpopular government was almost entirely forgotten after the attacks of October 7, when Israel morphed into the boundless genocidal entity it has become ever since, and members of the military stopped complaining about their fears of serving “a dictatorial regime”, and became, instead, mostly willing participants in something even worse — an ongoing genocide propelled endlessly by a notional state of perpetual emergency.

While Netanyahu clung to endless war as his shield against unpopularity and accountability, his second sacking of Gallant in November 2024 exposed profound disagreements about the conduct of the war behind the scenes. As the BBC described it, Netanyahu and Gallant had long had “a divisive working relationship”, and, throughout 2024, there were “reports of shouting matches between the two men over Israel’s war strategy.”

Gallant was sacked after increasingly disagreeing with Netanyahu on three particular issues — his insistence that there should be no exceptions for military service for Haredi Jews, his insistence that a national inquiry into the October 7 attacks was needed “to learn lessons”, and his insistence that the remaining Israeli hostages seized on October 7 and held in Gaza should be brought back as soon as possible, with compromises required to achieve that aim.

With reference to the hostages, he said, specifically, “I determine that it is possible to achieve this goal. It requires painful concessions, which the state of Israel can carry and the IDF can bear.”

The Haredi exception

The issue of the Haredi Jews, the ultra-orthodox Jews who have been exempt from military service since the founding of the State of Israel, was a particular bone of contention between Netanyahu and Gallant, reflecting an explosive fault line that runs through the whole of contemporary Israeli society.

The Haredim, religious purists, live austere lives devoted to the study of the Torah, and eschew modernity, keeping themselves as isolated as possible from what they view with disdain as the profane preoccupations of secular Israeli society.

Many are also profoundly opposed to Zionism, believing, as the Torah Jews website explains, that it is “a political movement that co-opted Jewish identity, transforming our sacred faith into earthly nationalism and pursuit of political ambitions”, stating that “Zionists rely on military power, nationalist ideology, and actions that contradict fundamental Torah principles”, and implacably opposing the demonization of Palestinians and the fanatical obsession with stealing their land and dispossessing them.

As they also explain on their website, “We follow God’s commandments, live in peace with our neighbors, and uphold the core Torah values of kindness and compassion toward all.”

Ironically, for secular Israelis, the Haredim have the highest birth rate in Israel, doubling their numbers every 20 years. As Al Jazeera reported in July 2024, although their population has “skyrocketed”, most still refuse to enlist, and long efforts to make them do so, via legislation, have not made enlistment compulsory.

At the time of Al Jazeera’s article, about 13,000 ultra-Orthodox young men were reaching the conscription age of 18 every year, but about 90 percent of them refused to enlist, with Al Jazeera noting that, in 2023, “66,000 Haredim did not enlist.”

After the Israeli Supreme Court authorized the military to begin drafting Haredi students in June 2024, including provisions from previous legislation establishing that those who refused to sign up would “not receive government funding”, Haredi communities, “who have lobbied and protested vehemently against the idea of doing military service”, were outraged, although, as Al Jazeera noted, the explosive fault lines continued to be exposed as other Israeli Jews were “getting angry at the Haredim, noting that they live off state benefits subsidized by other Israelis”, which had “led to some attacks against Haredi protesters”, and an attack on the car in which the head of the Knesset’s United Torah Judaism party was travelling.

Netanyahu, ever juggling and conniving to keep himself in power, recognizes the danger of forcing military service on an unwilling sector of the Israeli population — and, perhaps more importantly, to maintain the support of ultra-orthodox politicians — but for Gallant the exceptions were intolerable. In November 2025, when the government was supporting a bill to regulate Haredi enlistment, he insisted that what it would mean is that in practice, as the Times of Israel described it, is that “one in every four Jewish males would not enlist.”

The newspaper added that, “Taking Haredi demographic growth into account, the ratio would become one in three within just 15 years”, figures that prompted Gallant to declare, “We can’t allow ourselves this from a security perspective.”

Other fundamental disagreements between Gallant and Netanyahu

While this may have been the main topic that sealed Gallant’s fate, it’s clear that his demand for a national inquiry into the October 7 attacks was also unpalatable to Netanyahu, who continues to resist its implementation, on the cynical basis that it would expose his woeful shortcomings as a leader, including, perhaps, evidence of how advance warnings about the October 7 attacks were ignored, as well as information about the extent to which those killed on October 7 were killed by their own side, as Israeli forces implemented the “Hannibal Directive”, the notorious policy of Israelis killing their own to prevent them being taken hostage. On this topic, Gallant admitted its use in an explosive interview in February 2025.

On the hostages, as subsequently became clear, Netanyahu had no intention of compromising to any extent. Securing the return of the hostages without compromise — and the endlessly stated aim of “eliminating Hamas” — were the cover needed for his true aim, which was the ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people and the permanent occupation, in one form or another, of some, all or most of the Gaza Strip.

In May 2024, Gallant had also broken ranks with Netanyahu on this, when, as the BBC described it, he “voiced open frustration at the government’s failure to address the question of a post-war plan for Gaza.” In what was described as, at the time, “a rare public sign of divisions over the direction of the military campaign within Israel’s war cabinet”, he urged Netanyahu to “declare publicly” that Israel had “no plans to take over civilian and military rule in Gaza.”

He said that, since the start of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, he had presented plans that included proposals “to establish a local, non-hostile Palestinian governing alternative” to Hamas, but had “received no response.”

Looking forward to “the day after Hamas”, he said that the future for Gaza, and for Israel, could “only be achieved by Palestinian entities taking control of Gaza, accompanied by international actors”, but added that his proposals “were never debated, nor were any alternatives presented.”

Instead, he said, “the failure to set out a plan was leading Israel towards a ‘dangerous course’ involving Israeli military and civilian rule over Gaza”, and stated, “I call on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make a decision and declare that Israel will not establish civilian control over the Gaza strip, that Israel will not establish military governance in the Gaza strip, and that a governing alternative to Hamas in the Gaza strip will be raised immediately.”

Netanyahu’s only public response, however, was to state that he was “not ready to exchange Hamastan for Fatahstan.”

I’d suggest, however, that some of Gallant’s ideas made their way into the 20-point “Peace Plan” that eventually emerged under Donald Trump in October last year, securing the broken facsimile of a ceasefire deal that currently exists.

The plan secured the release of the remaining Israeli hostages without continuing military exertion, as Gallant envisaged, but the further plans for a Palestinian technocratic committee to oversee the day-to-day running of Gaza, supported by an international military presence — again, echoing his proposals — have not been realized.

This is, in part, because of Trump’s lack of interest and leadership, but primarily it is because Netanyahu has stopped the committee from entering Gaza, and has persuaded Trump’s front man for the “Peace Plan”, the former US official Nickolay Mladenov, that no further progress can be envisaged without the complete disarmament of Hamas, which they never agreed to, but which, he evidently hopes, will lead to a situation in which he can resume military attacks to “eliminate” Hamas, while further terrorizing and murdering civilians.

Genocidal statements

Ironically, when Gallant was fired, it was just two weeks before the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for him, and for Netanyahu, for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare, and intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population, and for the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.

Gallant, notoriously, had declared on October 9, 2023, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” Apologists later suggested that he meant Hamas, and not the civilian population, but it’s difficult to see how much of a difference that made when he was ordering a complete siege not of Hamas, but of the entire civilian population, a grotesque act of collective punishment.

Israel Katz, meanwhile, who was, at the time, the Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, posted an inflammatory statement on X on October 13, 2023, in which he stated, “We have to draw a line. We will not tolerate murdering children and burning families. The line has been crossed. We will fight the terrorist organization Hamas and destroy it. All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”

Katz was responding to a post by the US Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez citing a now-deleted genocidal post by the Canadian journalist Ali Velshi, which, by inference, endorsed or supported the starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza, in which she had written, “This is collective punishment and a violation of international law. We cannot starve nearly a million children to death over the horrific actions of Hamas, whose disregard for Israeli, Palestinian, and human life overall could not be more clear. We must draw a line.”

In tracing his genocidal intent, however, Katz’s statements ought to be the start of a process whereby the ICC also issues an arrest warrant for him, as well as for Bezalel Smotrich, the main driver of West Bank colonization, who is currently under scrutiny by the Court, and the monstrous Ben-Gvir, the master of Israel’s repugnant torture prisons, who has somehow still evaded official condemnation.

Netanyahu and Katz on endless war, endless assassinations and endless vengeance

Returning to the present, just two days ago, Israel Katz was crowing again, as renewed military attacks on Gaza led to the targeted killing of Mohammed Odeh, Hamas’ new military chief, just eleven days after his predecessor, Ezz Al-Din Al-Haddad, was also targeted and killed; an indication, perhaps, that the renewed push to “eliminate” Hamas, rather than seeking their disarmament, has already begun.

On X, Katz stated, “The fourth commander of the Hamas terror organization’s military wing in Gaza was eliminated yesterday and sent to meet his partners in the depths of hell.”

After praising the IDF and Shin Bet for their “brilliant execution”, he added, “We pledged to eliminate everyone who led the October 7 massacre, and that is what we will do. They are all marked for death, everywhere.”

He also, as the Times of Israel described it, “reiterated Israel’s goals of removing Hamas from power in Gaza”, and revisited his plans to advance what he described as a “voluntary emigration” from Gaza, “at the right time and in the right manner.”

This malignant and long-cherished dream, shared by all Israel’s senior officials up to and including Netanyahu, will, I’m sure, nevertheless remain as unattainable in the future as it has been throughout the genocide, and in the years before it. No one will take in Palestinian refugees, either because it would be a colossal war crime — of mass ethnic cleansing — or because, in the west, countries are now so racist that the idea is inconceivable. Israel only clings to it because of its extraordinarily blinkered sense of entitlement, and, more cynically, as a cover for the continued extermination of the Palestinian people while pretending that they can somehow leave their locked-down “open-air prison.”

In a joint statement after Katz’s comments above, Netanyahu and Katz said, “We will continue to pursue everyone who took part in the October 7 massacre. Sooner or later, Israel will reach them all.”

The statements above are all deeply troubling, as they so clearly locate Katz and Netanyahu as still inhabiting the same quasi-religious terrorscape that led Netanyahu, in the early days of the genocide, to state, “We are the children of light and they are children of darkness and the light will overcome the darkness”, and to compare the Palestinians to the people of Amalek, an ancient rival nation about whom the prophet Samuel, speaking to King Saul in the first Book of Samuel, and allegedly channeling the words of God, said, “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

When Israel Katz says that a slain Hamas leader has been “sent to meet his partners in the depths of hell”, we are meant to sympathize with the Israelis, and to once more obey their post-October 7 command that history began with the events of that particular day.

We are meant to see the Palestinians as evil, and the Israelis as pure, and to forget that the events of October 7 were just one day out of 78 years of horror in which, overwhelmingly, the forces of evil have been been, and still are the Israelis.

October 7 was a response to 75 years of murder, rape, torture, dispossession, apartheid, and arbitrary illegal imprisonment by the Israelis, and, every day since October 7, Israel has been engaged in a deliberate genocide against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip in which all those pre-existing crimes have been multiplied, repeated and amplified, with a death toll so high, and including so many civilians (men, women and tens of thousands of children), and destruction on a scale comparable only to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that, if there is a hell, it is surely the Israelis who will inhabit it.

Israel’s disturbingly endless pursuit of vengeance

As for the endless vengeance, the Wall Street Journal published a chilling exposé last week, by a reporter, Dov Lieber, “Inside Israel’s High-Tech Campaign to Kill or Capture Every Oct. 7 Attacker”, which made abundantly clear the extent to which endless vengeance is a hallmark of a country that, for decades, has led the world in extrajudicial assassinations of anyone perceived as opponents.

As the article established, after October 7, Israel set up a special task force to scrutinize every video and photo on social media, and messages on phones, to locate and eliminate anyone involved in any way with the events of October 7, including through the use of facial recognition software, and, most disturbingly, through the interrogation of Palestinians seized on the day and held in Israeli prisons under brutal conditions, including the use of torture, which would render any confessions they make fundamentally unreliable.

The list includes all Palestinians from Gaza who were identified as having crossed the border on October 7, as well as all Hamas leaders involved in orchestrating the massacre, and the security forces, disturbingly, “mark men for death without trial if they find at least two pieces of evidence showing they took part in crimes during the Oct. 7 attacks.”

Hundreds of individuals have been targeted and killed. One example cited involved Noa Argamani, an Israeli hostage whose kidnappers were caught on video, and who were then “tracked down by Israeli intelligence officials and killed in separate airstrikes.”

Chillingly, as the WSJ reported, although many senior militants have been targeted via the task force, including, it seems, those targeted and killed most recently, “No participant is deemed too insignificant — down to the man who drove a tractor through a border fence that day. Nearly two years after he breached the border, the tractor driver was identified, located and blown up in an airstrike as he walked a narrow urban street in Gaza, according to footage released by Israel’s military.”

The WSJ didn’t mention it, but the Times of Israel noted that the list included “people who were not affiliated with terror groups and joined the invasion of southern Israel on their own accord”, and stated, with reference to the tractor driver, that the WSJ report “did not identify the man or specify if he directly participated in violence on October 7.”

Interestingly, amidst all of Dov Lieber’s giddy and sickening enthusiasm for the targeted extrajudicial murder of militants who “learned too late the degree of Israel’s surveillance acumen and desire for retribution”, Noa Armagani’s father, Yacov, who was relieved his daughter was freed to spend time with her terminally ill mother in her final days, questioned the state’s fixation on vengeance.

He said that he “hadn’t been told about the killing of the two men who aided his daughter’s kidnapping”, and said, “Revenge, I don’t know what it adds. I’m telling you honestly, I don’t know what it adds.”

If only, as Israel’s fanatical obsession with genocidal mass murder, supremacist colonial expansion and vengeance grinds on and on and on, those in power could listen to, and understand Yacov Armagani’s words.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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