Pakistan’s defense minister threatens ‘illegitimate’ Israel after inking pact with Saudis, Turkey

Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Asif on Saturday told a news outlet in his country that “Israel is a threat to the entire Muslim world,” and called for “a united military front” against it, just a day after Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey signed a joint defense agreement.

“In the context of Israel, all Muslim countries must unite. I have no doubt about this,” Asif said

“Israel is a product of the Balfour Declaration, which was established in the 1940s as an illegitimate state, and it could pose a direct threat to any of the countries in the region,” he continued, referring to the 1917 British declaration of support for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish People in the Land of Israel, setting the stage for Israeli independence three decades later. Pakistan was similarly established on the basis of a British declaration in 1947, just a year before the founding of Israel.

Asif, who has in the past called Israel “evil and a curse for humanity,” and a “cancerous state,” told the interviewers that his fierce opposition to Israel will not change even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is defeated in this year’s elections, which are set for October 27.

“No matter who comes to power in Jerusalem – whether it’s [former premier Naftali] Bennett or any other leader – the differences are only marginal,” Asif said.

“Their attitude towards the Palestinians and their anti-Islamic mindset will not disappear. They continue to incite Muslim countries against each other,” he charged, “and as long as the Palestinian issue is not permanently resolved, the Islamic world must stand against them as one.”

Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif on Israel:

When it comes to Israel, all Muslim countries should come together. There is absolutely no ambiguity in my mind about that.

Given Israel’s current conduct, as well as the historical evidence of what it has been doing—at one… pic.twitter.com/3Uqzo1cdnR

— Clash Report (@clashreport) August 8, 2026

There was no immediate Israeli reaction to Asif’s threat. After his since-deleted social media post earlier this labeling Israel “cancerous,” in which he also called “to get rid of European jews [sic],” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his “call for Israel’s annihilation is outrageous,” particularly coming from a member of a government “that claims to be a neutral arbiter for peace,” referring to Islamabad’s role as a mediator in talks between Washington and Tehran on ending the US-Israel war against Iran. Israel is not a party to those negotiations.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan has no diplomatic relations with Israel. It voted against the establishment of modern Israel at the UN in 1947, does not recognize Israeli sovereignty, and says it will not do so until a Palestinian state is established along the pre-1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital. During a visit to India in 2018, Netanyahu said: “We are not enemies of Pakistan and Pakistan should not be our enemy either.”

That same year, the Mossad spy agenc seized a trove of nuclear documents from a Tehran warehouse in 2018, detailing Iran’s program to build nuclear weapons, which reporters from the New York Times who viewed the archive said was carried out with foreign assistance, “Much [of which] was clearly from Pakistan.”

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