US Senator Lindsey Graham has urged Israel to use a nuclear bomb in Gaza as decisive action to end the war, comparing it to the US dropping atomic bombs on Japan in World War II.
"When we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbour, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons," the Republican said Sunday on NBC, adding: "That was the right decision."
"Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war [that] they can’t afford to lose, and work with them to minimise casualties," he says in an apparently contradicting statement.
The South Carolina representative rants on, attempting to justify Israel resorting to such tactics as it was "okay" for the US to do so in Japan on 6 and 9 August 1945.
"Why is it okay for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war? Why was it okay for us to do that? I thought it was okay," he asks, as host Kristin Welker fails to get a word in.
"We decided to end the war [with Japan] by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons and that was the right decision. Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war that they can’t afford to lose.”
US Senator Lindsey Graham suggests nuking Gaza. pic.twitter.com/uHNC2uBixq
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen)
"So, Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state," adds Graham.
He also hit out at US President Joe Biden’s recent threats that Washington would stop arming Israel if it went ahead with the Rafah invasion, saying: "To abandon Israel now would be outrageous and dangerous."
Palestinian group Hamas slammed Graham’s "shocking" remarks and "his deep moral decline and the genocide and colonialism mentality that he harbours."
This mentality also exists "among the US political elite, who align themselves with a fully-fledged genocidal crime committed by the morally free Israeli army against isolated civilians," Hamas said in a statement.
The group, which Israel vows to destroy in Gaza, said Graham’s comments came "in the context of pledging allegiance to the fascist [Israeli] occupation, making their proponents complicit in the genocidal war."
"We call on the free people of the world to condemn and denounce these stances, and to continue pressing for an end to the aggression, and the war of genocide and starvation against our Palestinian people," Hamas' statement concluded.
Remarks like that of Graham’s have been shared by numerous American and Israeli officials since the start of the Gaza war, in which over 35,000 people have been killed, mostly women and children, according to an official count by the territory’s health ministry.
Earlier this month, US Representative Brian Mast said "Israel should go in there and kick the sh*t out of them," ahead of a looming ground invasion of Rafah, the Gaza Strip’s southernmost city yet to be stormed by Israeli troops.
Late last month, Israel’s extremist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, called for "total obliteration" in Rafah and other areas of the Gaza Strip.
In late March, US Congressman Tim Walberg said Gaza should be nuked rather than build a pier to facilitate humanitarian aid.
In November last year, around a month after the start of the war on October 7, Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu said dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza is "an option."
Biden is under increasing pressure to exert more efforts to put an end to Israel’s war on Gaza, halt the Rafah invasion and stop arming Israel. From political circles in Washington to pro-Palestinian student protests which have swept US college campuses, the US president is in hot water to do more to end what many nations call a genocide in Gaza, especially ahead of the November election.
