MK Ofer Cassif called the fight against Hamas immoral and a ‘war of revenge.’
By World Israel News Staff
Israeli lawmakers castigated far-left MK Ofer Cassif Monday for signing a petition supporting South Africa’s genocide charges against Israel.
MK Sharon Nir of Israel Beytenu, who is a member of the Knesset’s ethics committee, posted to X, “MK Cassif, I suggest that you resign from the Knesset and go run in the “elections” of the Palestinian Authority. No doubt the terror supporters will welcome you with open arms.”
Human rights organization Betzalmo requested that the ethics committee be convened immediately to remove Cassif from the legislature because the country is at war and “every moment that he is in the Knesset he literally undermines the State of Israel and endangers [its] life.”
“The prosecution of the State of Israel in The Hague is a very serious matter that will gravely harm Israel in the fight against terrorism,” said Betzalmo head Shai Glick. Cassif’s action “is a stab in the back of all the citizens [and] leaders of the country, the soldiers of the IDF, the families of the bereaved and the families of the abductees. Cassif must be thrown out – and yesterday. This is a violation of the entire book of ethics from cover to cover.”
“The man must go immediately to prison,” Glick added.
Cassif is the only Jewish MK in the Arab Hadash-Ta’al party. He, along with over 200 other leftists, joined Pretoria’s initiative to put Israel on trial at the International Court of Justice this week for allegedly committing “genocide against the Palestinian people” in its ongoing war against the Hamas terror organization in the Gaza Strip.
The petition charges that Israel is “starving” the population and that the IDF is “systematically” killing civilians. Neither the petition nor South Africa acknowledges that the IDF is fighting against a force that embeds itself in a civilian population, itself a war crime, and steals much of the humanitarian aid that other countries are trying to send to ordinary Gazans.
Cassif had announced Sunday that his” constitutional duty is to Israeli society and all its residents” and not to a government that “sacrifices them and commits crimes in their name on the altar of maintaining its existence.”
“I will not give up the struggle for our existence as a moral society,” he added. “That is true patriotism – not wars of revenge and calls for destruction, not unnecessary bloodshed, and not the sacrifice of civilians and soldiers in futile wars.”
Hamas fighters invaded Israel and massacred 1,200 people in Gaza envelope communities on October 7, the vast majority of them civilians, sparking the war that Israel declared in order to permanently remove the terrorist threat from its borders.
Cassif has also made other extreme and unsubstantiated claims against the IDF since the war began, such as posting to X in late October that “Israel is now slaughtering first of all the sick and the disabled and children. So many children. Enough killing that only takes away from a solution!”
Betzalmo demanded his removal from the Knesset then as well for “this lie, blood libel and slander” since the IDF does not target civilians at any time, let alone children, while Cassif was even charging that this was a deliberate state policy.
The organization added to the list of objectionable actions the fact that Cassif publicly praised Tal Mitnick, a leftist activist who last month became the first draftee to refuse to serve due to his objection to the war, at a time when “so many soldiers were sacrificing their lives in protection of the state.”