Elimination of Hamas still 2 years away, Israeli envoy says

New York consul-general said Israel will never accept a ‘terror state” in Gaza or Judea and Samaria and knows it has full U.S. backing.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Israel’s consul-general in New York, Ofir Akunis, said that it will take another year or two to eliminate Hamas and that the government knows it has full U.S. backing to reject a “terror state” right on its borders, The New York Post reported.

In an interview last week, the paper said, Akunis compared the fight against Hamas to World War II.

“It will take time. We can stop [the war] after Hamas is not there — maybe it will take another year or two years. It took six years — six years — for the Western world to defeat Germany,” he said.

Akunis specifically mentioned that there were “hundreds of miles” of terror tunnels still existing under major portions of the Gaza Strip that needed to be blocked up or destroyed.

Leaving the majority in place through lack of choice, the IDF focused on blowing up only the most strategic tunnels while fighting the terrorist forces in the coastal enclave during over 15 months of warfare, until a ceasefire went into effect last month.

Akunis did not say that Israel would end the ceasefire and go back to fighting to get rid of Hamas, although U.S. President Donald Trump has given Israel the green light to do so.

He did state, however, that if the war does resume, it would “look different” than before, without providing details.

Israel knows it has full American backing with the current administration to do whatever would be necessary, the consul-general continued, while making a point of praising Trump’s revolutionary idea to remove all the Gazans to other countries while the U.S. rebuilds the enclave.

“All of the international community must be open to new ideas,” he said of the reconstruction project, which could take a decade or more.

With the exception so far of the UAE, the proposal has been generally rejected by the Arab world as well as by several European countries that have accused Trump of wanting to “ethnically cleanse” Gaza while insisting that it must be part of a future Palestinian state.

Israeli officials who enthusiastically support the incipient plan have said that Palestinians would be allowed to return only if they believed in peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state.

Akunis, a member of the Likud party, also made it clear that he does not believe in giving the Palestinians a state of their own, especially after what Hamas did as rulers of the Strip over the last two decades.

“Gaza was a Palestinian state,” he noted. “Do you think that the Israelis should accept the idea of the same terror state in Judea and Samaria and in the Gaza Strip again? The answer is no.”