Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel does not have a “timetable” to defeat Hamas but that Israeli forces will continue their attacks in the Palestinian enclave “until we eradicate” the terrorist group.
“I’ve set goals. I didn’t set a timetable because, you know, it can take more time — I wish it would take little time,” the prime minister said in an interview that aired Thursday with Fox News’s Bret Baier. “But we’re proceeding step by step reducing our casualties in the process, trying to reduce and minimize civilian casualties, and maximize the casualties of the Hamas terrorists, and so far, I think it’s proceeding well, but again, you know, this is a warning.”
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Netanyahu added that he does not think it will take Israel as long to fight Hamas as it took the United States to fight ISIS or al Qaeda, but he emphasized that the Jewish state will battle against Hamas “however long it takes.”
“We have the perseverance, the will, and the resolve to win, however long it takes, but I assure you we will try to make it as short as we can,” Netanyahu said.
The prime minister admitted that Hamas is a “tough enemy,” claiming Hamas fired upon its own citizens to keep Palestinians from reaching “safe corridors.”
“That’s the enemy we’re dealing with,” the prime minister said. “Not only do they murder, mutilate, rape, and murder women, burn children alive, take hostages of toddlers, babies, elderly Holocaust survivors — the worst savagery perpetrated on the Jewish people since the Holocaust — not only do they do that, but they actually target their own civilians. That is, they want to keep their civilians as a human shield.”
Netanyahu said that “the fighting continues against the Hamas enemy” even during the four-hour pauses in northern Gaza that will allow civilians to evacuate.
“We did one yesterday, and I assume we’ll do one tomorrow because our goal isn’t to fight the Palestinian civilians; it’s to fight the Hamas terrorists,” Netanyahu said.
“And we make a distinction between the two. They don’t,” he added.
Netanyahu also praised the House’s censure of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who is one of a few House Democrats who have called for an end to the Israeli occupation. She most recently was criticized for embracing the phrase “from the river to the sea” on social media, which some claim is synonymous with the eradication of Israel as a state.
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“From the river to the sea means there’s no Israel,” Netanyahu said, adding that Tlaib was calling for the “genocide” of the Jewish state. “So that’s absurd, and I salute the Congress for censoring her. But it’s beyond that.”
“This is an indictment of, I suppose, of higher education in many places in the West, when people who are supposedly educated cannot distinguish right from wrong and good from evil,” the prime minister added. “Hamas is evil. Hamas is evil, and we have to defeat evil, not protest and demonstrate on behalf of evil.”
