Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, has said Israel has a “biblical right” to control territory from the Euphrates to the Nile.
He made his remarks in an interview with Tucker Carlson, aired on Friday.
Carlson asked Mr Huckabee if Israel had the right to claim “basically the entire Middle East as its own”, based on precedent laid out in the Bible.
“It would be fine if they took it all,” Mr Huckabee said, before adding “but I don't think that's what we're talking about here today".
Mr Huckabee, an evangelical Christian Zionist, has faced criticism since taking up his ambassadorship. Critics say he advocates for Israeli policies while minimising Palestinian rights. For instance, he calls the occupied West Bank by its biblical name of Judea and Samaria, a term the Israeli government prefers.
During the interview, Carlson asked whether Israel’s legitimacy and its right to exist were rooted in a biblical promise of land to the Jewish people, noting that scriptural references encompass a vast geographic area.
Mr Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, responded that Israel was not attempting to claim all the land as such but was seeking to maintain control over areas where Israelis currently reside.
“They’re not asking to go back to take all of that,” Mr Huckabee argued. “But they are asking to at least take the land that they now occupy, they now live in, they now own legitimately, and it is a safe haven for them.”
The remarks come at a sensitive moment in the region, as international concern grows over Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and the viability of a two-state solution.
The UN human rights office on Thursday accused Israel of committing war crimes and said practices that displace Palestinians and alter the demographic composition of the West Bank “raise concerns over ethnic cleansing".
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, citing findings collected between November 2024 and October 2025, said Israel was engaged in a “concerted and accelerating effort to consolidate annexation” while maintaining a system “to maintain oppression and domination of Palestinians".
The Israeli security cabinet this month approved measures that would allow Israelis to buy land in the West Bank, and gave the government more authority over the territory.
Israeli rights group B’Tselem says about 45 Palestinian communities have been emptied out completely since the start of the Israel–Hamas war in October 2023 amid demolition orders and settler attacks.
