Israeli MP: I'd 'execute' Palestinian attacker's family

Palestinians have criticised an Israeli legislator who said he would "execute" a Palestinian assailant's family as revenge for an operation that killed three Israelis in an occupied West Bank settlement.

In a video posted (Hebrew) over the weekend on his official Facebook account, which has more than 82,000 likes, Israeli Knesset Member Oren Hazan said he would demolish the home of Palestinian assailant Omar al-Abed and "execute" his family.

Mustafa Barghouti, the former Palestinian information minister and general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative political party, said Hazan's comments expose "how deeply ingrained racism" has become in Israel through "its system of apartheid and occupation".

"It's very dangerous," he told Al Jazeera by telephone, "and these types of comments are overlooked by many parties in the international community."

Hazan said in the video: "I want to be honest without sounding too extreme, god forbid, but if it was up to me I would've gone to the terrorist's house yesterday, grabbed him and his whole family and executed them all together."

He went on to say that "an execution is the lightest sentence" that Abed could receive.

Abed, 20, hopped over the fence of Halamish, a Jewish-only settlement in the central West Bank, and stabbed three Israelis to death last week as tensions soared over Israel's crackdown on entry to the al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem.

Hazan complained that Abed, who Israeli forces shot, has been hospitalised in an Israeli facility, adding: "Let him [Abed] die, let him wallow in his own blood. They don't have a right to live, they don't have the right to even exist, and I hope that everyone will say that with me."

He is a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party.

On Tuesday, the Israeli army arrested Ibtisam al-Abed, the assailant's mother, for saying she was "proud" of her son in a video shared widely on social media outlets.

She had also told the Israeli daily Haaretz that she did not support the attack.

In the Facebook video, Hazan also blamed Hanin Zoabi and Ahmed Tibi, Palestinian legislators in the Israeli Knesset, for supposedly inciting Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

At the time of publication, Hazan had not replied to Al Jazeera's request for a comment.