The president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, criticized Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich at a conference in Jerusalem on Tuesday and accused the Israeli government of failing to understand the damage that his inflammatory statements on the Gaza war are causing to the country’s reputation.

Lauder directed his comments to Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who was attending the WJC meeting.

“Let me tell you, all the good things that Israel is doing are being destroyed by Smotrich,” said Lauder. “Because his statements about starving the people and destroying [Gaza] were played all over the world, and the prime minister has the chance to stop him from saying these things, and will not do it. The question is, why not?”

His remarks were met with applause from many in the audience, who were attending with various Jewish delegations from around the world.

Sa’ar, in response, said simply that he “took note” of what Lauder had said.

Smotrich, who leads the far-right Religious Zionism party, has a history of inflammatory remarks about Palestinians and the Gaza Strip.

Earlier this month, he bragged that Israel was “finally going to occupy the Gaza Strip,” and then a day later predicted that the war-torn enclave would be “totally destroyed” within a matter of months, leaving its roughly 2.3 million residents “totally despairing,” and confined to just a narrow swath of land.

He also drew the ire of British broadcaster Piers Morgan on Tuesday, over his comments on the decision to renew humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, after more than two months of a total blockade.

Morgan, like Lauder, is generally a staunch supporter of Israel, although he has been increasingly critical of its strategy in the Gaza Strip of late.

Smotrich had vowed that the aid entering Gaza would be “the minimum necessary,” to ensure that “the world does not stop us and accuse us of war crimes.”

At the same time, he said, Israel “will destroy everything that still remains in the Strip, simply because everything there is one big terror city.”

Responding to a subtitled video of the remarks on X, Morgan questioned how anyone could “listen to what Smotrich says here and not conclude he sounds like a genocidal maniac?”

Israel’s government “has been taken over by headbangers like him,” Morgan charged, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is just letting them do what they want.”

“Who will stop them?” he asked.