TEHRAN - While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells the Iranian people in English-language video messages that his goal in bombing their homes, hospitals, and schools is to bring them “freedom,” when speaking in Hebrew to Israeli audiences he openly admits that the objective is the elimination of the Iranian nation.

On Tuesday, while inspecting the ruins of an Israeli military complex in the occupied territories following Iranian missile strikes, Netanyahu told reporters that the regime must fight Iran in the same way Jews fought the “Amalek” in the Torah.

In the Torah, the Amalek were a people regarded as a persistent and archetypal enemy of the Jews, whom the text says must be eradicated. The key Torah verse that explicitly commands the elimination of Amalek as a nation is Deuteronomy 25:19, which instructs Jews to “blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”

Previously, Israeli soldiers and politicians have described Palestinians in Gaza as the “Amalek.” Israeli settlers have appeared on Hebrew-language media openly claiming that, based on what they believe are their religious teachings, every Palestinian woman, man, child, and even animal in Gaza must be exterminated from the face of the Earth. In a poll conducted by an Israeli university last year, over 75% of Israelis said they believed there are "no innocent lives" in Gaza.

Israel has been accused of genocide by human rights groups and United Nations experts for its actions in Gaza over the past two and a half years. They note that the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza—which has flattened the enclave, destroyed nearly every home, hospital, school, and place of worship, and killed at least 70,000 Palestinians—was carried out with the aim of ethnic cleansing.

In his latest war against Iran, Netanyahu, backed by the Trump administration, has employed the same modus operandi. After assassinating the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, in the opening hours of the war through airstrikes on his Tehran office on February 28, the two regimes have continuously bombed schools, homes, hospitals, and sports complexes. In one instance, the two regimes killed at least 170 girls aged 7 to 13 after bombing their school in southern Iran in two different phases. So far, at around 1050 Iranians have been killed.

Under international humanitarian law, bombing schools, hospitals, and civilian homes constitutes a war crime, as these sites are protected civilian objects.

Iranian authorities have stated that they do not expect any meaningful action from the United Nations or other international bodies to halt these attacks, citing their impotence in the face of U.S.-Israeli crimes in Gaza.