Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s hardline new minister for strategic affairs, has said the Jewish state should use the same methods in Gaza that Russia had in Chechnya, the AFP news agency reports.

Israel should operate in the Gaza Strip “like Russia operates in Chechnya,” Lieberman, local media quoted the leader of the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party as saying during a meeting of Israel’s security cabinet. He spoke Wednesday after at least six Palestinians, including three militants, were killed and dozens injured in a major Israeli incursion in northern Gaza that the Jewish state said was aimed at stopping rocket fire.

Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, a former chief of the Shin Beth internal security service, reportedly upbraided Lieberman. “Gaza is not Chechnya and we are not the Russians,” Dichter said. “Our tactics are completely different.”

Russia has fought two wars in the southern republic of Chechnya in the post-Soviet period, in which some 10,000 soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians are estimated to have been killed. Chechnya’s capital Grozny was bombed extensively during the campaigns, prompting comparisons with Germany’s Dresden after World War II, and Russian troops have been accused of massive human rights abuses in the Caucasus republic.

Some 270 Palestinians and three Israeli soldiers have been killed during the past four months in Gaza in an Israeli offensive after militants killed two soldiers and seized a third in a cross-border raid. At least 5,470 people have been killed since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000, most of them Palestinians, according to an AFP count.

Lieberman, an immigrant from ex-Soviet Moldova who draws his support from fellow transplants from the former Soviet Union, joined the government this week as minister for strategic affairs and fourth deputy premier.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said that government policies would not change with the inclusion of the ultra-nationalist.

Lieberman has in the past has called for the bombing of Egypt’s Aswan dam and for the execution of Israeli Arab MPs who have had dealings with the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement, which the Jewish state considers a terrorist organization.

Popularity: 1% [?]