Smotrich: War will end after Hamas, Hezbollah eliminated

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has reiterated his refusal to reach a prisoner exchange deal with Hamas to stop the war on Gaza, and called for launching a large-scale war against Lebanon.

“We are now paying the price for 30 years of a false perception, of not being prepared to pay the price of war, and therefore we made the monsters of terror in Gaza and Lebanon grow stronger, and this ended during our term, and the war must end only when Hamas and Hezbollah are absent,” Smotrich said in an interview 103FM yesterday.

“I was beaten during a demonstration against the Oslo Accords when I was in the eighth grade, and the Shin Bet arrested me when I tried to refrain from the terrible stupid move of evacuating Gush Katif,” he added, referring to Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

“We shouted: ‘Don’t give them [the Palestinian Authority] guns.’ Now we are facing cannons and LAW missiles. They promised us that Hezbollah’s missiles would rust,” he added.

Israeli society, he explained, is not unified in blaming Hamas for what is unfolding in Gaza, which “harms the war effort”, adding that “this is not a political event, but rather an existential event for the state of Israel.”

Lapid: Israel’s probe into 7 October is a show serving Netanyahu