Hamas leaders may be saying that they’d be willing to agree to a five-year cease-fire in exchange for keeping their political power, but Israel will never agree to a pact that does not dismantle Hamas or return the 133 hostages still in Gaza more than six months after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, Tal Heinrich, a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Newsmax on Sunday.
“We [made] a decision as a nation when we defined the war objectives,” Heinrich said on Newsmax’s “Sunday Report.” “We said that we want to bring every hostage back home. There’s not going to be leaving of anyone behind.”
Israel also swore to dismantle Hamas and to make sure that “Gaza will never pose a terror threat to us again,” she said.
Neither one of the war objectives is mutually exclusive, Heinrich added.
“We can’t discuss on air the terms and the nature of negotiations that, you know, are taking place in order to try to yield another framework that will see the release of the remaining hostages,” she said.
“Human lives hang in the balance. But I can tell you that there’s not going to be any kind of cease-fire that would leave Hamas or the hostages in Gaza, and there’s not going to be any kind of humanitarian pause in the fighting without the release of hostages.”
Pressure is the one thing that does work against Hamas, Heinrich said. She also insisted that Israel’s plans for the incursion into Rafah are still in play, as the city must be secured.
“It is on the border with Egypt, a very strategic corridor from which much of the infrastructure and ammunition has funneled into Gaza over the years,” said Heinrich. “We will no longer continue to live next to this terror enclave, and we cannot allow any such ammunition to enter from there in the future after we eliminate Hamas … We must go into Rafah and operate there. There are plans being made, of course, that any kind of operation there will be carried out with full consideration of civilian care.”
Heinrich on Sunday also spoke out about the protests that are going on in U.S. college campuses, insisting that it’s important to label them as being anti-Israel or anti-American, but not pro-Palestinian.
“Listen to what these people are chanting,” she said. “In Michigan, they chanted ‘death to America.’ At Princeton, I saw some flags of Hezbollah being held by students. Do these people even know how many American soldiers were killed by Hezbollah?”
Heinrich added that many of the protesters don’t know the meanings of the signs they’re holding, meaning their “pure ignorance is being revealed.”
It’s also telling that terror groups are praising the protesters, she said.
“These are useful idiots because the terrorists are watching them, and they say, ‘They’re doing the work for us. We can sit back and let the international pressure that these students are trying to apply play, so we could live another day to carry out another Oct. 7 massacre,” said Heinrich.
“That’s what they’re hoping for, that there are enough stupid people out there.”
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