Defense Minister Israel Katz compared Iran's spiritual leader to Hitler and said that such a man "should not exist".
"If the state of Israel had existed during the Holocaust and we knew that we could send the army of Israel into a bunker to capture Hitler and stop him from exterminating the Jews, we would have done it," Katz said during a visit to the site of the Iranian missile strike in Holon. "Khamenei is a modern-day Hitler," he added, according to the Times of Israel.
When asked if eliminating Khamenei was one of the goals of the war, Israel Katz replied: "The goals of the war are to eliminate the nuclear threat, eliminate the sources of destruction and neutralize the missile threats. Within this framework, the Israel Defense Forces has received instructions and knows that in order to achieve all the goals, this man must certainly cease to exist."