Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman wants the government to order the IDF to assassinate Hamas leaders in Gaza if they do not return to Israel the body parts of fallen soldiers Lt. Hadar Goldin and Sgt. Doron Shaul, who were buried with whatever body parts were able to be retrieved.
Lieberman, speaking to mayors in southern Israel, the area that has taken the brunt of Hamas terror since the expulsion of Jews and withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza in 2005, said that ”we have to get rid of Hamas.”
He will get little argument from most quarters. It’s a great idea, but the government has been unable or to scared to do so, and even if it did, eradicating Hamas is useless without a “day after” pill.
His latest brainstorm, the third in less than month, is to assassinate Ismail Haniyeh and Moahmmed Dief. Haniyeh officially no longer is prime minister because Hamas and its rival terror faction Fatah, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, pulled off a sleight-of-hand whereby Hamas and Fatah declared a unity pact that makes supposed civilian “technocrats” members of the government and placates the United States, which officially considers Hamas an outlawed terrorist group. So what if Hamas gives orders to technocrats?
Lieberman, like almost every other Israeli, is not so dumb as to swallow that position, but his solutions to the problem of Hamas do not put him ahead of the class.
How can it be that Israel, with the best army in the Middle East and one of the best in the world, cannot defeat a motley crew of 26,000 terrorists?
Just kill every single one of them. Nice idea, if it would work.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri called Lieberman’s threats, calling them “ridiculous.”
Similar to his latest solution, Lieberman’s previous inspirations have raised the same question of what he would say if he were to lead the first tank into Gaza and hunt down all the murderers.
When the war began last month, Lieberman opined that Israel should simply take complete control of Gaza. Interior Minister Gideon Saar has suggested that Israel re-establish Jewish communities in Gaza, giving Israel an online presence. That also would help the economy in Gaza, and it might happen one day. But not today. Or tomorrow. Or this year.
Taking over Gaza would be the best solution for Gazans. Like it or not, they enjoyed their best society in decades when Israel took over Gaza in the Six-Day War in 1967. The flourishing economy rotted when the intifada began in the 1980s, and it has been downhill ever since. Hamas has trampled on civil liberties, has employed children to build tunnels for terror, and it killed many of the workers for ”knowing too much” about the locations. It has made life miserable for the few surviving Christians, and it has been well-documented that Hamas has bombed its own civilians whom it used as human shields.
Life under Israel would be great for Gaza. It also is the last thing Israel wants right now.
It would be the last thing Lieberman would want if he were to jump in the first tank into Gaza and absorb anti-tank missiles.
If he were to survive, he and tens of thousands of other soldiers would remain in Gaza for a few months, if not years, to keep all of the other jihadists from making trouble,
And there is UNRWA, which has perpetuated the miserable and hopeless lives of Gazans by declaring them to be “refugees,” just like a few million others in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon Iraq and other countries.
So perhaps taking over Gaza is not such a smart idea, at least not this year, but Lieberman then came up with the aberration of letting the United Nations take over.
Lieberman insisted to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, “A U.N. mandate over Gaza Strip is a possible option for Israel to rid itself off the headache of Gaza and pass the mission of demilitarization of the strip to the United Nations.”