On Thursday’s “CNN News Central,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) stated that Israel listened to the Biden administration at the beginning of the war with Hamas and “They delayed the invasion based on administration advice to take it more slowly, to devise a better plan before they went into Gaza. But it’s hard to say that Israel is listening to us now. They are clearly doubling down on these same tactics.”
Moulton said, “I think there was good evidence that Israel was listening to the administration at the beginning of the war. In fact, we in Congress were briefed in a classified setting that the invasion would start much sooner than it did. They delayed the invasion based on administration advice to take it more slowly, to devise a better plan before they went into Gaza. But it’s hard to say that Israel is listening to us now. They are clearly doubling down on these same tactics. But all of us, including the veterans in Congress who wrote this letter, want to see Israel succeed in its mission to eliminate Hamas. Hamas has to be eliminated if Israel is ever going to be secure and if the Palestinians are ever going to be free. Let’s not forget, Hamas is an organization with the destruction of Israel written into its charter, an organization that uses its own people, the people of the Gaza Strip, as human shields in this conflict. So, we want to see Israel succeed in getting rid of Hamas, and we’re concerned that their current tactics are not going to achieve that goal, that you can’t win what is fundamentally a counter-insurgency fight just by killing your way out of a solution. Because every time you kill innocent civilians — and we know that Israel has done a lot of that — you help recruit terrorists to the cause. So, my hope is that ultimately Israel will see what we’re trying to tell them. We’re trying to share a bunch of lessons that we learned, painfully, over years of fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our hope is that Israel will finally see that their success is dependent on their changing their tactics.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
