It would be a “big mistake” if Israel reoccupied Gaza, President Joe Biden said in a 60 Minutes interview that aired on Sunday. Hamas has killed 1,400 Israelis since invading the country on October 7, and Israel is expected to launch a ground offensive in Gaza soon.
“Look, what happened in Gaza, in my view, is Hamas and the extreme elements of Hamas don’t represent all the Palestinian people. And I think that … it would be a mistake … for Israel to occupy … Gaza again,” Biden said. “But going in but taking out the extremists — the Hezbollah is up north but Hamas down south — is a necessary requirement.”
“There needs to be a Palestinian Authority. There needs to be a path to a Palestinian state,” Biden added, when asked if he thinks Hamas should be eliminated.
Israel gave one million Palestinian civilians 24 hours to evacuate Gaza and on Saturday, Israel’s military said that it was preparing for “combined and coordinated strikes from the air, sea and land.”
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007, after it won the Palestinian parliamentary election in 2006. Hamas, which the United States has designated a terrorist group since 1997, has promised to annihilate the state of Israel.
Biden, who has always been pro-Israel, said that Israel has the obligation to respond to Hamas’s attacks.
“Israel is going after a group of people who have engaged in barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust,” Biden said. “Israel has to respond. They have to go after Hamas. Hamas is a bunch of cowards. They’re hiding behind the civilians.”
The president also said he supports humanitarian supplies being brought into Gaza.
“There’s a standard that democratic institutions and countries go by,” he said. “I’m confident that there’s gonna be an ability for the innocents in Gaza to be able to have access to medicine and food and water.”
In response to Biden’s interview, the Israel Ambassador to the U.N., Gilad Erdan, told CNN on Sunday that Israel has no interest in occupying Gaza.
“We have no interest to occupy Gaza, or stay in Gaza, but since we are fighting for our survival and the only way, as the president himself defined, is to obliterate Hamas, so we will have to do whatever is needed to obliterate Hamas,” Erdan said. “There are many, many questions regarding the future, but we will have time to discuss them, to negotiate them. Obviously, we would like to be coordinated with our American allies. But for now, the only focus should be on how to release the hostages, how to secure our future by obliterating Hamas capabilities. It’s a very complicated goal to achieve, so we’re not thinking now what will happen the day after the war.”
Erdan also confirmed that Hamas terrorists are preventing Palestinians from trying to flee Gaza, adding that Hamas wants “to increase the number of civilian casualties in order to recruit naive organizations like the U.N. to pressure the law-abiding democracy that is Israel, instead of pressuring the terrorist that is Hamas.”
The State Department said on Sunday that at least 30 American citizens have been killed in the terror attacks. An additional 13 Americans are missing.