Israel Matzav

'Asking Hamas to demilitarize Gaza is like asking a Priest to convert to Judaism'

Former Israeli military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin says that asking Hamas to demilitarize Gaza is like asking a Priest to convert to Judaism. It won't happen. If Israel wants Gaza demilitarized, the IDF must do it.

“This is their ideology, what they believe in, their resistance,” he added. “They will not demilitarize Gaza voluntarily. The only one who can demilitarize them is the IDF.”

Yadlin, who is currently the head of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said that Israel needed to apply “much more military pressure” on Hamas' military wing, which he acknowledge has been “beaten,” but not hard enough.

Neither Hamas' leaders, nor its “main terrorist fighters,” have been killed, Yadlin said in a conference call organized by The Israel Project.

The only way to achieve a durable ceasefire and a political arrangement in the long run “is either by weakening or even destroying Hamas,” he said.

Yadlin also dismissed the US claim that if we destroy Hamas we will get something worse. 

Yadlin said that the paradigm that the devil you know is better than the one you don't, and that at least with Hamas in control of Gaza there was an “address,” was applicable up until two months ago.

But since then, he said, Hamas has proven to be “not an address, but a military threat. I don't see any alternative that will be worse than Hamas. I call to waken and destroy Hamas as much as we can.”

Yadlin also said that Israel has known about the tunnels since the Shalit kidnapping in 2006, but could not act against them preemptively because the 'international community' would not have let us. He also said that there are greater threats to Israel in the region.

Read the whole thing. 

Labels: Amos Yadlin, Gaza, Hamas, IDF, ISIS, Operation Protective Edge, terror tunnels

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:24 AM