Top Israeli official Ron Dermer said on a podcast yesterday that even if the entire world turns against Israel, they will still invade Rafah and exterminate Hamas from existence.
His comments come as Joe Biden has asked the Israelis to come to Washington for strategic advice on Rafah while he’s also pushing for a six-week ceasefire.
Here’s more from Bloomberg:
A top Israeli official said his country’s military is ultimately going to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah and defeat Hamas “even if the entire world turns on Israel, including the United States.”
“We are going to go in and finish this job, and anybody who doesn’t understand that doesn’t understand that the existential nerve of the Jews was touched” by the Oct. 7 attack when Hamas operatives killed 1,200 and abducted 250, Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer said on a US podcast posted online Thursday.
A close confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Dermer is headed to Washington early next week to listen to concerns from the Biden administration that such an invasion would cause many more civilian casualties at a time when famine and disease are spreading in Gaza.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in the region pushing for a deal between Israel and Hamas that would lead to a six-week cease-fire and an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners along with a big increase in humanitarian aid to the more than 2 million Palestinians in the coastal strip.
Dermer said the US hasn’t categorically rejected any Israeli military operation in Rafah.
“They said without a credible way of moving a mass of people out of Rafah and surging humanitarian assistance to them they don’t see how this can be done effectively,” he said. “And we are saying we agree with you that we have to move the people out, we agree we have to get humanitarian assistance to them, and we believe we can do it.”
Dermer said he’s going to Washington to listen to US ideas about what to do. There have been a number of disagreements between the US and Israel over strategy during the more than five months of conflict, but they worked through them in the end, he said.
“Could you have a breach over Rafah? You could. We hope we don’t.”
Israel has no choice but to go into Rafah and destroy Hamas and it should be non-negotiable. The fact that the Biden administration is trying to persuade them otherwise just shows the world that Biden only cares about getting reelected and not about Israel actually defeating Hamas.