Huckabee tells Lebanese being bombed to thank Israel for seedless watermelons

Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel and a passionate advocate of its wars in the region, has told the people of Lebanon to be grateful for Israeli contributions to its society.

Video of Huckabee speaking at the Atlas Awards in Tel Aviv on 12 May is being shared online after it was picked up by Chris Menahan of the news site Information Liberation.

In the speech, Huckabee extolls the various purported Israeli contributions to society, including USB drives, cherry tomatoes and seedless watermelons.

“I wonder if everyone in Lebanon understands that if there were no Israel, they wouldn’t have a cell phone,” Huckabee said.

“I wonder if they understand that every time they use a USB, every time they use car navigation, that every time they eat a cherry tomato or have a delicious bite of seedless watermelon, instead of saying, ‘I can’t talk to those people,’ they should step across the border, shake their hands and say, ‘Thank you’.”

Lebanon’s southern border is currently subject to intense bombardment, and scores of displaced residents who have attempted to return to their homes in the south have been targeted by Israel

Lebanon’s Health Ministry says Israeli air strikes have killed 3,151 people and wounded 9,571 since 2 March.

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The dead include 123 medics, at least 210 children and nearly 300 women.

Huckabee is an outspoken and unapologetic Christian Zionist who has frequently expressed strong backing for Israeli government policies.

In an interview with US podcast host Tucker Carlson, Huckabee supported Israel’s right to take over all of the Middle East to form “Greater Israel”, and said the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament gives the modern-day state of Israel the right to expand its borders.

“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee said when Carlson asked him whether Israel had the right, according to the Bible, to occupy the land between the Nile and the Euphrates.

Huckabee has also been an advocate of the US-Israeli war on Iran, which is currently at a stalemate, with Iran blocking off the critical energy chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz.