Israel’s Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef said Saturday night that the terrorist who murdered three members of the Salomon family in Halamish should not have survived the attack.
“It’s a shame they didn’t kill this terrorist. They should’ve killed him,” he said during his weekly Torah lesson.
Yosef dedicated his lesson to the memory of Yosef Salomon, 70, his daughter Haya, 46, and his son Elad, 35 who were murdered, and to the quick recovery of Tovah Salomon, 68, who was wounded.
“Any Arab, terrorist, who comes to kill, should not come back alive. If we know he came to hurt the Jewish people—we must kill him, not just wound him, kill him,” Yosef said.
In his sermon, the chief rabbi also mentioned the two Druze police officers who were killed in a terror attack at the Temple Mount last week, speaking of the lifelong covenant between the Jews and Druze in Israel.
This isn’t the first time Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef calls to kill terrorists. A year and a half ago, during another weekly lesson, he said it is a commandment to kill a terrorist who comes to carry out an attack with a knife.
Rabbi Yosef added at the time, “that there is nothing to fear—not from the IDF’s chief of staff or the High Court,” referring to Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot’s statement during a meeting with high school students in which he said he “doesn’t want a soldier to empty a magazine on a girl with scissors.”
Despite the harsh words, he also had reservations: “If he no longer has a knife, then you have to imprison him for life until the arrival of the messiah, who will tell us who the Amalekites (Biblical enemy of the people of Israel) are and then we will be able to kill them.”
