An Israeli minister who ran the Mossad operation to capture Adolf Eichmann has hinted that Israel might use similar tactics to kidnap President Ahmadinejad of Iran and place him on trial before an international court.

Rafi Eitan, now 81, was one of the agents who seized Eichmann in 1960 and transported him from Argentina to Israel, where he was tried and executed for carrying out Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” to kill European Jewry.

Such an operation, he suggested, could be ordered so that Mr. Ahmadinejad could be tried for anti-Israeli rhetoric.

Mr. Ahmadinejad has made numerous vitriolic attacks on Israel, including remarks — which some of his supporters dispute he ever made — calling for “Israel to be wiped off the map.”

Mr. Eitan suggested that the International Criminal Court in the Hague could try Mr. Ahmadinejad, although it is not clear which of the genocide and war crimes laws would apply. The comments about a possible snatch operation came in an interview with Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, when he was asked if Mossad was still in the hunt for Nazis.

“That era is over,” he said. “But that’s not to say that such operations are completely a thing of the past.

“It could very well be that a leader such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suddenly finds himself before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.”

Mr. Eitan described Mr. Ahmadinejad as someone who “spread poison.” According to Mr. Eitan anyone who wanted to eradicate another people had “to expect such consequences.”

“A man like Ahmadinejad who threatens genocide has to be brought for trial in the Hague,” he said. “And all options are open in terms of how he should be brought.”

Asked if kidnapping was acceptable, Mr. Eitan replied: “Yes. Any way to bring him for trial in the Hague is a possibility.”

The minister of pensioner affairs is a colorful figure who came late to the political arena. He leads Israel’s Pensioners’ Party, the surprise success of the general election in 2006 when it won seven seats, enough to be invited into the ruling coalition.

The depth of Iranian public hostility towards Israel was demonstrated when 40 Iranian MPs demanded that Mr. Ahmadinejad be disciplined after one of his aides said something that they deemed to be supportive of Israel.

The vice president, Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, was reported as having said that Iran was a “friend of the Israeli people.”