Why Hasn't Israel Nuked Gaza?

It's a crazy idea, right? Well, not for everyone.

Who in their right mind would consider dropping nuclear weapons on the 2.2 million residents trapped in the Gaza Strip? Meet Israel’s Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu.

Eliyahu is one of the extremist members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. He was telling a journalist in an November 5 interview why he thought that Palestinians in Gaza had no right to exist and that anyone waving a Palestinian or Hamas flag “shouldn’t continue living on the face of the earth.” The reporter asked whether he was suggesting that some kind of nuclear bomb might be dropped on Gaza. The heritage minister said “That’s one way.”

Now, Eliyahu is not a particularly influential figure. He has no part in the war cabinet directing the war. And Netanyahu condemned his statement after it set off a furor. He temporarily suspended Eliyahu from cabinet meetings in what the Times of Israel called, “a slap on the wrist.” But he is part of the extreme faction of Netanyahu’s government whose goal is to push Palestinians out of Israel and the occupied territories.

Eliyahu is a member of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party. He and other members of the party are against allowing any humanitarian aid into Gaza because “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza,” Eliyahu said, and “we wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid.”

He wants to re-occupy all of Gaza and restore Jewish settlements there. He would push out all Palestinians, saying “They can go to Ireland or deserts, the monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves.” That is when he raised using nuclear weapons as one way of dealing with the Hamas threat.

This view precedes the October 7 massacre. In 2017, now-Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich detailed a “decisive plan” in which Palestinians in the West Bank would be forced to forswear all hope of an eventual Palestinian state or they would be evicted from their homes and forced out of the West Bank. Smotrich is the head of Religious Zionism, a far-right party allied with Otzma Yehudit.

In 2021, Smotrich declared that “a true Muslim must know that the Land of Israel belongs to the People of Israel, and over time Arabs like you who do not recognize this will not stay here.” He told Palestinian members of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, that they were “here by mistake—because Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and throw you out in 1948.”

As part of his portfolio, Smotrich oversees the Israeli civilian administration of the West Bank. It is no wonder that settler violence has increased there dramatically. Peter Beinhart detailed these views earlier this year in his article for Jewish Currents, “Could Israel Carry Out Another Nakba?”

Destruction caused by two 2,000 pound bombs dropped on a Gaza refugee camp.

Beinhart is referring to the Arabic word for “catastrophe” that Palestinians use to describe the events following the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948 when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their villages, many ending up in Gaza. As Beinhart feared, some, like the former head of the Israeli National Security Council Giora Eiland, are now calling for a new Nakba. “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf,” Eiland says. After October 7, these views are growing more popular in the Israeli mainstream.

But, still, would the Israeli government actually use nuclear weapons to carry out Eiland’s apocalyptic vision that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist”? Almost certainly not.

The reason is that nuclear weapons are vastly more powerful than any conventional weapon. Their use is still taboo. Israel, like every nation since 1945, realizes that the mass destruction of nuclear weapons is simply out of proportion to any military objective.

In the four weeks of the war on Gaza, Israel has dropped thousands of bombs that have killed over 10,000 people, including 4,000 children. Over one-third of the buildings in northern Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. One human rights group claims that Israel has dropped over 25,000 tons of bombs to-date, approximately equal to two Hiroshima-size atomic bombs.

As horrific as this destruction has been, it pales in comparison to what just two modern nuclear weapons would do.

The experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimate that Israel has approximately 90 nuclear weapons. It can deliver them by airplane, missile or by cruise missiles launched from one of their submarines. We don’t know for certain the yield of these weapons. But it is reasonable to assume, as the Bulletin experts do, that they are single-stage, boosted fission warheads. That is, they are atomic bombs whose explosive power has been increased by “boosting” them with some hydrogen fuel. Such a device might have a yield of 100 kilotons, or 100,000 tons of explosive force, the equivilant of seven Hiroshima-size bombs.

Just one of these bombs would kill over 300,000 people immediately and severely injure another 350,000. (See estimated damage from NukeMap, above.) Two of them would destroy almost all of Gaza, killing or injuring most of the people living there.

You can see why even Netanyahu says that Eliyahu’s remarks were “disconnected from reality” and why Eliyahu himself says that he was just speaking “metaphorically.”

Nuclear weapons are simply too horrible to use for any practical military advantage. Nor do they serve as a deterrent to conventional attack. Israel has had nuclear weapons since 1968, but it has been attacked several times since then (including several major wars and two intifadas). Nor did nuclear weapons prevent the horrible Hamas slaughter of innocent civilians on October 7.

The “nuclear taboo” still holds. “It stems from a powerful sense of revulsion associated with such destructive weapons,” writes Brown University professor Nina Tannenwald, who coined the term, “Since its rise during the Cold War, the nuclear taboo has been embraced by the United Nations and by leaders and publics around the world as a norm of international politics.”

Even after the horrific October 7 massacres and Israel’s brutal, revengeful war, this norm stands.