00:00Some statements are so extreme, so openly cruel, that you have to read them twice just
00:07to believe they were said out loud.
00:10This is one of them.
00:11Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has publicly laid out what he calls the most
00:17effective way to stop Hezbollah.
00:20And here it is.
00:21Word for word, destroy 10 buildings in Beirut for every drone fired.
00:26If there were 7 drones, 70 buildings.
00:29If there were 15, 150 buildings.
00:33And if Beirut runs out of buildings, move on to Tyre, then Sidon, then the Beka Valley.
00:39Let that sink in.
00:41This is not a general speaking off the record.
00:44This is not an anonymous source.
00:46This is a sitting cabinet minister of the Israeli government, publicly, calmly, putting a mathematical
00:53formula on the mass destruction of a civilian capital city, 10 buildings per drone.
00:59That is not a military doctrine.
01:02That is collective punishment, stated openly, without shame.
01:07And it gets worse when you understand who is saying it.
01:10Bezalel Smotrich is not some fringe voice.
01:13He's Israel's finance minister.
01:15He sits at the cabinet table.
01:18He shares power with Prime Minister Netanyahu.
01:21And alongside him sits National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, another minister with a long
01:28and well-documented record of extreme anti-humanitarian positions that have repeatedly shocked the international
01:35community.
01:36Together, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have done something genuinely dangerous.
01:41They have taken the most radical fringe positions on Palestinian and Arab lives and dragged them
01:47into the mainstream of Israeli government policy.
01:51What was once unsayable is now said in press conferences.
01:56And Lebanon is bleeding because of it.
01:593,000 people have already been killed in Lebanon due to Israeli bombing.
02:043,000 lives.
02:06Families.
02:07Children.
02:08Entire neighborhoods gone.
02:09And now, a minister is standing up and saying, not enough.
02:14Let us make it faster.
02:15Let us make it systematic, building by building, city by city, until there is nothing left to
02:22destroy.
02:23This is not strategy.
02:25This is not security.
02:27This has a name in international law.
02:30And that name is collective punishment.
02:32It is a war crime, explicitly prohibited under the Geneva Conventions.
02:37Not debatable.
02:39Not a gray area.
02:40What Smotrich described, point by point, is a blueprint for wiping out civilian infrastructure
02:46on a mass scale, as a deliberate act of retaliation against an entire population.
02:53And the world is watching.
02:55Or rather, the world should be watching, because statements like this one do not stay as statements
03:02for long.
03:02Not when the men making them have real power, real budgets, real influence over where bombs
03:09fall.
03:09So, the question tonight is not just about Lebanon.
03:13The question is, at what point does the international community stop calling this a conflict and start
03:20calling it what it is?
03:213,000 dead.
03:23An entire capital city being publicly threatened with systematic demolition.
03:28Ministers competing to sound more extreme than the last.
03:32How many more before someone, anywhere, has the courage to say, enough?
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