News - Middle East: On the evening of October 28, three weeks into the genocidal campaign in the besieged Gaza Strip, Israeli regime premier Benjamin Netanyahu brazenly justified the horror by calling the Palestinian resistance movement an iteration of the Amalek rhetoric.

He described the Hamas resistance group as an enemy of incomparable cruelty, quoting Deuteronomy 25:17: "You must remember what Amalek has done to you" and adding "We do remember."
Out of the 23,145 verses of the Old Testament, Netanyahu chose the ones that are among the most violent and have a long history of being used by Zionists to justify killing Palestinians.
The Book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Jewish Torah and the fifth book of the Christian Old Testament states: "You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. You shall not forget."
The Hebrew text further calls for the killing of the entire nation of Amalek: "Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey."
In this verse from the first Book of Samuel 15:3, God commands King Saul to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Jews, and totally destroy all that belongs to them.
The Amalek rhetoric is one of the numerous ideologically inspired comments used by Israeli officials to justify the genocidal campaign in the besieged coastal strip of 2.2 million population, which has already claimed almost 10,000 lives, most of them children.
According to a poll conducted in October, half of Israeli Jews declared that the Tel Aviv regime should "not at all" consider the "suffering of the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza" in the next phase of fighting, and that casting the enemy as Amalek reinforces that attitude.
Although there is a consensus in mainstream Judaism among the Rabbis that Amalek no longer exists and cannot be a reference to justify attacking anyone, many Zionists before Netanyahu used this rhetoric against the Palestinians.
One example is Israel Hess, an Israeli Rabbi who in 1980 published an article for the student publication of Bar-Ilan University in which he equated the Palestinians with Amalek and explicitly called for their genocide.
Mordechai Eliyahu, a former chief Rabbi of Israel from 1983 to 1993, also drew parallels between the Palestinians and Amalek, giving authority to indoctrinate Zionist children in Israeli religious schools.