US congressman says war in Gaza ‘should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima’

Representative Tim Walberg (Republican from Michigan), 72 years old, said last week, during an event at Dundee City Hall (Michigan, USA), that the war in Gaza “should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima”, invoking the atomic attacks from the USA to Japan, in August 1945, which ended the Second World War and left more than 200 thousand dead.

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“End this quickly,” said Walberg, a member of the House of Representatives, about the conflict in Gaza, which began after a Hamas attack on a festival in Israel on October 7, causing hundreds of deaths, reported the “Huffington Post”.

According to the parliamentarian’s office, Walberg’s statement was “just a metaphor to support Israel’s rapid elimination of Hamas.”

“He has great empathy for the innocent people in Gaza who were put in this situation by the attack carried out by Hamas that left 1,163 innocent civilians dead,” said advisor Mike Rorke.

The comment from Walberg, who has been a lawmaker since 2011, was in response to a question asked by someone at the meeting about the deployment of US troops to Gaza. Since the October 7 attack, the Israeli Defense Forces, with US support, have engaged in a relentless bombing campaign that has displaced most of Gaza’s residents and killed more than 30,000 of them, including many women and children.

American President Joe Biden is under great pressure to fund humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip, where the population is ravaged by famine. Israel has refused international calls to open more land routes to deliver aid.

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In response, the Defense Department announced earlier this month that it would build a pier for aid shipments off the coast of Gaza in the Mediterranean Sea. The logistics involved in building the pier, however, have led to questions about how to prevent U.S. troops from being placed in harm’s way.