Lapid Says Young Israelis Told Him Gaza's 'Babies Too' Should Be Killed

Yair Lapid, Israel's former prime minister, says he recently sat through what he called "a furious and painful meeting with a group of really young people" in which they argued that Palestinian infants in Gaza should be killed.

"I heard all the rhetoric of: 'they all need to be killed,' 'there are no innocent people,'" Lapid said in an interview published Wednesday. When he pressed them on infants specifically, he recounted their answer.

"What about babies? They said: 'babies too, because eventually they'll grow up and become terrorists.'"

Lapid said the group told him this applied even to two-week-old infants.

Lapid, who led a short-lived government in 2022 and now sits with the centrist-right Together party, framed the exchange as a measure of Israeli society's drift rather than an isolated outburst. "So, Hamas won," he said, adding that the rhetoric reflected "Hamas's standards" rather than Israel's own. He linked the shift to the government's failure to act against ministers who called for starving children in Gaza, saying it produced "internal damage where you fail to define value-based standards for being different from Hamas."

Lapid did not reject Israel's military campaign itself, calling it a "just" war and dismissing accusations of genocide as "nonsense." But he said flatly that "children shouldn't die in grown-ups' wars, period."

A documented rightward shift

Lapid's account lands alongside polling that shows the attitudes he describes are not fringe among young Israelis. A Channel 12 News poll found 74 percent of Jewish Israelis aged 18 to 22 hold right-wing or centre-right views, with 15 percent backing far-right parties such as Itamar Ben Gvir's Otzma Yehudit and Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionist Party, both of which advocate expelling Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. A mock election last month at a high school in Ramat Gan produced nearly identical far-right support, a ten-point jump from 2022.

The pattern surfaced again last month when Lior Schleien, a left-leaning comedian who interviews young Israelis about politics, posted footage of a young man telling him, "Give me a knife, I'll murder them. Every Arab," and that every Israeli Jew should be armed to kill as many Arabs as possible. Schleien deleted the clip at the request of the young man's parents, who said they were shocked by their son's comments.

A separate poll cited in the reporting found 64 percent of all Israelis, not just the young, agreed there are "no innocent people" in Gaza. A 2024 study found young Israelis trending more hawkish and more religious than older generations.

None of this is Lapid's opposition speaking in the abstract. It is a former head of government describing, in his own words, what he was told to his face.