Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu Details Three Keys To Achieving Peace In Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined three prerequisites to successful and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza on Monday.
Netanyahu detailed the keys to peace in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal. According to the Israeli leader, the first step toward peace involves destroying the terror group Hamas.
Israel declared war on Hamas and invaded the Gaza Strip as a result of a terror attack on October 7 during which Hamas terrorists killed about 1,200 Israelis. Hundreds more Israelis and others were taken captive by Hamas and Palestinians who followed the terrorists into Israel.
To destroy Hamas, “its military capabilities must be dismantled and its political rule over Gaza must end,” Netanyahu said.
“Hamas’s leaders have vowed to repeat the Oct. 7 massacre ‘again and again.’ That is why their destruction is the only proportional response to prevent the repeat of such horrific atrocities. Anything less guarantees more war and more bloodshed,” he continued.
The prime minister also noted the difficulty Israeli forces have had at killing Hamas members while protecting Palestinian civilians. The terror group often uses non-military areas such as hospitals and neighborhoods to hide its command centers and other military targets. The Israel Defense Forces have taken to warning civilians in targeted areas through the use of dummy bombs, leaflets, and phone calls to urge Palestinians to evacuate.
Strikes have killed Palestinians, however, leading to international pressure that Israel’s response to Hamas has not been proportionate. Netanyahu said such accusations embolden Hamas and other terror groups to continue using such inhumane war tactics.
“Unjustly blaming Israel for these casualties will only encourage Hamas and other terror organizations around the world to use human shields,” the prime minister wrote.
The next prerequisite to peace is demilitarizing Gaza.
“Israel must ensure that the territory is never again used as a base to attack it. Among other things, this will require establishing a temporary security zone on the perimeter of Gaza and an inspection mechanism on the border between Gaza and Egypt that meets Israel’s security needs and prevents smuggling of weapons into the territory,” Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu dismissed turning Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA has failed to control radicals under its own authority in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank. The PA leadership also fosters anti-Semitism among its people and supports terrorism against Israel.
Empowering the PA would make the third prerequisite for peace unreachable: deradicalizing Gaza.
“Schools must teach children to cherish life rather than death, and imams must cease to preach for the murder of Jews. Palestinian civil society needs to be transformed so that its people support fighting terrorism rather than funding it,” Netanyahu wrote.
Young Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are often indoctrinated into radical Islam by Hamas and its supporters. One former terrorist-in-training, Yaron Abraham, explained his education in Gaza last month after escaping from Hamas control.
At the age of 9, Abraham began training to be a Shaheed, a religious martyr for Islam, at the mosque in the Gaza Strip. The school day ran from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. His education began with memorizing the entire Quran, including Sharia law.
“From there, we started to understand what was the goal of this institution. What is the goal? To turn you into a Shaheed. They did not give us weapons; they didn’t give us knives; they were working on turning us into living weapons,” or suicide bombers, Abraham said.
“You live [death] every day and every night. What scares you is staying alive, sinning; God forbid wanting to live as a normal human being, someone who wants to get married and such things, to get to know what it means to be a child,” he said.
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