Netanyahu calls comments about village obliteration ‘inappropriate’

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a Twitter thread Sunday that statements by a senior ally of his government calling for the obliteration of a Palestinian town were inappropriate, after the United States United said they rejected those claims.

In the English-language thread shortly after midnight, Netanyahu did not appear to directly condemn the comments and hinted that his ally, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, had misrepresented himself. Netanyahu thanked Smotrich for later reviewing his remarks and “clarifying that his choice of words” was “inappropriate.” Most of the thread urged the international community to demand that Palestinians condemn attacks on Israelis.

It appeared to be his first public response to Smotrich’s remarks on Wednesday.

Netanyahu’s tweets showed how the Israeli leader had to balance the ideology of far-right members of his government with the expectations of Israel’s main ally, the United States. Smotrich is the leader of one of the many ultranationalist parties that make up Netanyahu’s government, the most conservative in the country’s history.

Last week, Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank ransacked the Palestinian town of Hawara, where two Israeli brothers had previously been killed in a Palestinian shooting. Later that week, Smotrich said Israeli forces, not private citizens, should clear the city.

The minister later recanted, saying he did not mean the city had been wiped out, but rather that Israel was operating in the city surgically against Palestinian militants. Even so, his first comments sparked an international scandal.

The United States dismissed his words as repugnant and urged Netanyahu to “reject and disavow them publicly and clearly.” The United Nations, along with regional powers Egypt and Saudi Arabia, condemned Smotrich’s remarks.

In a Hebrew-language tweet posted around the same time, Netanyahu said even foreign diplomats make mistakes, an apparent reference to an Israeli Channel 12 report that US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides made derogatory comments about Smotrich earlier during his visit to Washington this week and said he would “throw him out of a plane” if he could. A US Embassy spokesman denied saying that.

In a tweet on Saturday, Smotrich said in a tweet on Saturday that he was “convinced he didn’t mean to kill me when he said I should be thrown out of a plane, just like I didn’t want to hurt innocent people when I said Hawara should be cleared.”

In his tweets, Netanyahu wrote that “it is important that we all work to tone down the rhetoric” amid spiraling violence between Israel and the Palestinians.

“This includes calling out inappropriate statements and even correcting our own statements when we are wrong or take our words out of context,” he wrote.

Later, the president castigated the Palestinian Authority for failing to condemn Palestinian attacks on Israelis, and the international community for failing to demand the condemnation of Palestinians.

Israel has long claimed that the international community has double standards in its expectations of Israel and the Palestinians. Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War, territories the Palestinians claim form a future state.

Israel has maintained an indefinite occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank for 55 years and, together with Egypt, maintains a blockade on the Gaza Strip.