Tesla CEO Elon Musk has described the Israel-Hamas as one of the most “contentious subjects”, saying that the killing of children in the occupied territory would further create hatred for the occupier.

“For every Hamas member you killed [then] how many did you create and if you created more than you killed then you have not succeeded,” he said in a conversation with Lex Fridman in Lex Fridman Podcast that he shared on X on Thursday.

In a more than two-hour podcast, he spoke about war, peace, artificial intelligence, physics, politics, video games, and the future of humanity.

He went on to add that “it’s safe to say that if you kill somebody’s child in Gaza, you have made at least a few Hamas members who will die just to kill Israeli that’s the situation.”

The health ministry in Gaza said on Friday that 11,078 people have been killed in five weeks of an Israeli military campaign targeting the militant group since October 7. The death toll includes 4,506 children, a health ministry statement said, while 27,490 people have been wounded in the war, which erupted with deadly Hamas attacks on southern Israel.

Musk stressed the need for looking from a standpoint where fewer terrorists were being created if the parties wanted long-term peace.

“War will exist and always have existed,” he said and lamented that very few people truly understand the horrors of war today at least in the US.

“An eye for an eye makes everyone blind. If you are not going to just stop [then] you are going to commit genocide against entire people which would not be acceptable and you will leave a lot of people alive who will hate Israel,” he said.

It merits her to mention that last month, Musk extended support to Gaza by making Starlink satellite connectivity available during an internet shutdown.

At the start of the podcast, the CEO of X said that he was a proponent of peace and that ignorance was the real enemy that had to be countered. “They really wanted to put the worst atrocities they could in order to provoke the most aggressive response from Israel and then leverage that the rest of response to rally Muslims worldwide for the cause of Gaza and Palestine which they have succeeded in doing.”

He recommended that Israel must engage in the “most conspicuous acts of kindness possible”, saying that it was the actual thing that would pause Hamas.