On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated Israel’s commitment to the total destruction of Hamas, and declared that no force on earth will stop that goal. He was addressing new IDF recruits at the the IDF Induction Base at Tel Hashomer. (Courtesy: Israel Government Press Office)
Category: Elimination
Netanyahu: ‘No force in the world will stop us’ from ‘eliminating’ Hamas
This is a very significant day in your life and in the life of the state. The state exists thanks to our ability to defend ourselves. These attacks have not ceased since we established the state; this has been the fate of the Jewish people for hundreds and even thousands of years. What has changed with the establishment of the state is our ability to repel these attacks, sometimes at a very heavy cost, but with a strength that the entire world understands, we may not always like, but we know that without it we would not exist.
This is what you are doing here today in the various units, brigades and corps. We are, in effect, defending the existence of our state, which is also the personal existence of each and every one of you, your families, your friends and also the coming generations. This is no exaggeration or lofty words. These are very precise words; this is what will determine if our state exists.
The most prominent thing that we have seen in the six months since the outbreak of the war is the immense increase in the motivation of the young people, the desire to enlist, defend and fight, both young men and young women. We have never seen such a thing. This attests to the power of life in our people. I think that you deserve all praise as well as the understanding that you are – in effect – doing something of historic significance.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu added, about the fighting in the Gaza Strip [translated from Hebrew]:
“We will complete the elimination of Hamas’s battalions, including in Rafah. No force in the world will stop us. There are many forces trying to do this but it will not help because this enemy, after what it has done, will not do this again. Nor will it exist. We are committed to doing this, and each one of you now, at this base, will contribute in one way or another to completing the goal. That must be it. After doing such a thing to our country – it will not be done any more.
We have three objectives: One – to return our hostages, all of the field observers, and not just them, but everyone together. We will return them all. The second objective: Eliminating Hamas. The third objective: To ensure that Gaza will never again constitute a threat to Israel.
There is a fourth objective: Hamas is part of Iran’s axis of evil, which aims to destroy us. And when we defeat Hamas, it is not only defeating Hamas – it is defeating the axis. Everyone in the Middle East and beyond is sitting in the stands and watching who will win on this field, Israel or Iran and its proxies. You already know who will win. Good luck!”
Also participating in the visit were the Prime Minister’s Chief-of-Staff, the Prime Minister’s Military Secretary, the Head of the IDF Personnel Branch, the commander of the Border Defense School and additional senior IDF officers.
Meanwhile, Israel is doing all it can to protect civilian lives in Rafah, contrary to Hamas, which is using civilians as human shields. But the world does not pressure Hamas to surrender; it pressures Israel to abandon its necessary war for the benefit of Hamas.
“Israel purchases 40,000 tents for Rafah evacuation, invasion,” by Yonah Jeremy Bob, Jerusalem Post, April 9, 2024:
Israel and the US have been debating whether the evacuation of Palestinian civilians from Rafah would take one or four months.
The Defense Ministry has purchased 40,000 tents to better enable the evacuation and prepare for an invitation to Rafah in the relatively near future.
Although the ministry acknowledged to the Jerusalem Post that 40,000 tents would not be enough for all 1.4 million Palestinian civilians currently in Rafah, it is still considered a significant step forward.
There was no official announcement. The leak of the purchase could also be a nod to the US, being transparent about the process to prepare for the evacuation in advance after months in which Washington complained that Israel’s preparations for evacuating civilians were both too secretive, and insufficient.…
Netanyahu after talk with Biden: ‘We are determined to complete the elimination of Hamas’
SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/03/netanyahu-after-talk-with-biden-we-are-determined-to-complete-the-elimination-of-hamas; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains resolute despite world pressure and interference. He addressed the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee about his continued goals. He also discussed briefly a phone call with Joe Biden. (Courtesy: Israeli Government Press Office)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, today (Tuesday, 19 March 2024), made the following remarks at the start of his meeting with the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee [translated from Hebrew]:
“We are in a dual campaign – a military campaign, and a diplomatic campaign. Of course, they are inter-connected, the diplomatic fight gives us the time and the resources to reach the full results of the war.
We have been fighting for over five months, this is a record in the history of Israel’s wars, except for the War of Independence. We are – of course – under growing international pressure, which we are rejecting in order to achieve the goals of the war. The goals of the war are, to be succinct: the destruction or elimination of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, the release of all of our hostages and ensuring that Gaza never again constitutes a threat to Israel.
In order to do this, we need to complete the military elimination of Hamas. There is no alternative to this. We cannot go around it; neither can we say . We will destroy 80% of Hamas and leave 20%’, because from that 20%, they will reorganize and take over the Strip again and – of course – constitute a new threat to Israel. And of course, this will be a victory for the greater axis that threatens us – the Iranian axis.
Therefore, we are determined to complete the elimination of Hamas. This requires the elimination of the remaining battalions in Rafah and – of course – the 1.5 battalions in the camps in the center. We are determined to do this. We have a debate that I will put on the table, and we all know it. US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan also said this yesterday. We have a debate with the Americans over the need to enter Rafah, not over the need to eliminate Hamas, but the need to enter Rafah. We see no way to eliminate Hamas militarily without destroying these remaining battalions. We are determined to do this.
Out of respect for the President, we agreed on a way in which they can present us with their ideas, especially on the humanitarian side; of course, we fully share this desire to facilitate an orderly exit of the population and the providing of humanitarian aid to the civilian population. We have been doing this since the beginning of the war.
However, I made it as clear as possible to the President that we are determined to complete the elimination of these battalions in Rafah, and there is no way to do this without a ground incursion.”
Rutgers Prof Noura Erakat: ‘Zionism Is Based on Racial Elimination’
Colonial law and the erasure of Palestine w/Noura Erakat
SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/02/rutgers-prof-noura-erakat-zionism-is-based-on-racial-elimination#; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:
“There’s not enough at this moment to support the charge of genocide” brought against Israel," said George Washington University international affairs and political science professor Michael N. Barnett during a January 18 webinar. His comments marked a fleeting, rational moment in a discussion of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) charges against Israel, otherwise marked by the panel’s Israel-hatred exemplified by Noura Erakat, associate professor of Africana studies at Rutgers University. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Islamist-dominated Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers.
Barnett joined Erakat – among the most vitriolic anti-Israel academics in America – to address the Arab Center Washington DC’s webinar on “Gaza and the Crime of Genocide: Legal and Political Dimensions of Accountability.” The webinar followed South African’s December 29, 2023, submission of genocide charges against Israel at the politicized ICJ, based in The Netherlands.
“Reading the South Africa report, 85 pages of quite impressive detail, suggest that there is a very strong case for atrocity crimes and war crimes, which in many ways carry the same kind of heavy consequences as do genocide,” Barnett proclaimed. “But initially, I was of the view that the South African charge was a bit of political grandstanding,” he added. For advice, he could turn to Germany – with its history of genocide against the Jews – as Germany has intervened in the case and condemned South Africa’s politicization of genocide.
Erakat, on the other hand, labored to lend an aura of academic respectability to a fusillade of false anti-Israel claims. Since October 7, 2023, “three months of warfare” in Israel’s offensive to destroy Hamas in the Gaza Strip “has resulted in over 24,000 Palestinian deaths, 40 percent of whom we are told are children, or 10,000 children,” she said, reciting casualty figures from Hamas-run agencies without noting their distortion into anti-Israel propaganda. Analysis of Hamas’s claims reveal that Israel has maintained a two-to-one civilian/enemy combatant casualty ratio in Gaza, remarkably low for such difficult urban terrain and a testament to extraordinary Israeli efforts to protect civilians.
Erakat focused on the fate of Gaza hospitals, noting that “Israel began bombarding the last remaining hospital, Nasser Hospital,” in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, Gaza’s “last functioning hospital.” Israel “has decimated now nearly 35 other hospitals” as Hamas “command-and-control centers, as launching pads and human shielding,” yet “at the very same time has failed to provide evidence,” she claimed. This false claim disregards numerous reports from Israelis, American intelligence, journalists, and physicians who have worked under Hamas control in Gaza, as well as released Israeli hostages once held in such hospitals.
Ignoring the difficulties of conducting military operations in Gaza, she asserted that Israel justified “this high level of death and destruction” as the “result of an urban warfare, dense areas, Hamas fighting, Hamas human shielding.” This “makes it seem that somehow the conditions” Israel faces “fighting Hamas in urban conditions is unprecedented,” she said, although military observers have noted the unique challenges facing even Israel’s experienced troops. Hamas has had over a decade to embed itself in an extensive network of tunnels underneath Gaza’s urban infrastructure, where almost every civilian structure cynically shields military installations.
International law “mandates a state to cease and desist an operation should the civilian harm and casualties exceed the military advantage to be achieved,” Erakat concluded. She did not clarify what level of proportionately between civilian and military casualties would prohibit Israel from fulfilling its stated war aim of destroying Hamas, an existential threat to Israel. “We can see very well that the military advantage that Israel has achieved is minimal if non-existent,” she claimed, for “Hamas continues to fire rockets from the center of Gaza City, indicating that its capability has not been diminished.” Yet the Israeli government has said it has already destroyed two-thirds of Hamas’s fighting units, which would be a significant achievement in such a difficult campaign.
Erakat was disappointed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not impressed with the ICJ’s authority – its jurisdiction is not compulsory – as she. “Right in the aftermath of the ICJ hearing, we heard Prime Minister Netanyahu say that it does not matter what The Hague says, that Israel will proceed as it sees fit,” she complained. Thus, “it is up to any country to decide what it needs to do in order to ensure its national interest,” she said, as if this were not a common maxim for any country fighting for its citizens’ survival.
Israeli Agricultural Minister Avi Dichter’s recent reference to a “Gaza Nakba” alarmed Erakat. This Arabic word for “catastrophe” has achieved mythological status for people of Palestinian descent like her. It refers to some 600,000 Arabs who lost their homes during Israel’s 1948 independence war in the territory that became Israel. In 1948, “Israel conducted military operations that targeted Palestinian civilians” under a “defensive operation in Plan Dalet – that plan included the destruction of villages,” she said, invoking propagandistic myths about Plan Dalet. She thus reiterated the common Palestinian falsehood that Israel expelled most of the 1948 Arab refugees, when in reality most of them fled conflict, often with the encouragement of Arab leaders who wanted to clear free-fire zones.
Today, Erakat fears that “Israel has articulated that it wants to achieve a Nakba, or the removal of Palestinians, in order to achieve its security and peace” as in 1948. “Other forms of colonization,” she said, “are based on racial discrimination, whereas Zionism is based on racial elimination.” Not only does this twist Dichter’s words, as he spoke merely of Gazans evacuating conflict zones, but it fails to mention that no countries in the Arab world or beyond want to receive Gazans, with their well-known jihadist sympathies, as refugees.
Superficially, Erakat’s statements may sound sober and sophisticated. Unmasked, they reveal her unremitting hatred of Israel. Her promotion of South Africa’s genocide charges against Israel illustrates how the Jewish state, no matter how grievously attacked, will be portrayed as fascistic and evil while providing a platform from which to demonize Israel.
Andrew E. Harrod, a Middle East Forum Campus Watch Fellow, freelance researcher and writer, is a fellow with the Lawfare Project. Follow him on Twitter: @AEHarrod. This article was cross-posted with the author’s permission from New English Review.