(AP) - Michael Hertzog, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., says Gaza is “the biggest terror complex in the world,” with tens of thousands of fighters and rockets, among other weaponry — and 310 miles of underground tunnels.
“This is what we’re up against. And we have to uproot it, because if we do not, they will strike again and again,” Hertzog told CBS' “Face the Nation” in an interview aired Sunday.
He also said Israel was making every effort to distinguish between “terrorists and the civilian population” in its war with the Hamas militant group that rules Gaza.
“This is a very complicated military operation in a densely populated area, and we’re trying to move the population away from that war zone,” he said.
Israeli airstrikes hit two refugee camps in the central Gaza Strip on Sunday, killing scores of people, health officials said. The strikes came as the U.S. keeps urging Israel to take a humanitarian pause from its relentless bombardment of Gaza and rising civilian deaths.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Ramallah in the West Bank for a previously unannounced meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Blinken later flew to Baghdad for talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. On Saturday Blinken met with Arab foreign ministers in Jordan, after holding talks in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who insists there could be no temporary cease-fire until all hostages held by Hamas are released. President Joe Biden suggested that progress was being made on the humanitarian pause.
The Palestinian death toll in the Israel-Hamas war reached 9,700, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza. In the occupied West Bank, more than 140 Palestinians have been killed in violence and Israeli raids.
More than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed, most of them in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that started the fighting, and 242 hostages were taken from Israel into Gaza by the militant group.
Families of Israel hostages fear the world will forget
The photo of the white-haired woman in a golf cart, wrapped in a purple blanket and flanked by a gunman, was among the first to emerge of the hostages seized during the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
But Yaffa Adar’s granddaughter is afraid that the world’s memory of that harrowing day – and the impetus to free some 240 people held by Hamas – is fading. So Adva Adar and her brother, like many other relatives of the hostages, have left Israel for what they hope will be a friendly reception in cities around the world.
Paris, Atlanta and London. Chicago and Vienna. The island of Cyprus.
They fear the alternative will be a collective amnesia, as memories of that day are replaced by news of Palestinian deaths in Gaza. Israeli social media is filled with images of the missing person flyers of the hostages being ripped down around the world.
“It’s very scary thinking that it’s going to be old news that my grandmother will stay hostage,” Adva Adar said.
US FORCES SHOOT DOWN ATTACK DRONE NEAR BASE IN SYRIA
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. forces shot down another one-way attack drone Sunday that was targeting American and coalition troops near their base in Tel Baider, Syria, a U.S. official said on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the strike.
There was no information immediately available on the origin of the attack drone, but it marked at least the 32nd attack on U.S. and coalition military facilities in Iraq and Syria since Oct. 17. To date there have been at least 17 attacks in Iraq and 15 in Syria. At least 21 servicemembers have been injured by the attacks but all have returned to duty, the Pentagon said.
FORMER PRESIDENT OBAMA SAYS ALL SIDES OF CONFLICT ARE “COMPLICIT TO SOME DEGREE”
Former President Barack Obama says “nobody’s hands are clean” in the Israel-Hamas war and acknowledged that he’s questioned in recent days whether his administration could have done more to push for a durable peace when he was in power.
“If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth,” Obama said in an interview on “Pod Save America.” “And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean. That all of us are complicit to some degree.” The former president went on to tell his interviewers, Obama administration alumni Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor, that he has asked himself since the start of the war, “Was there something else I could have done?”
The former president did make an attempt at peace between Israel and Palestinians during his second term, but months of talks collapsed in 2014 amid disagreements on Israeli settlements, the release of Palestinian prisoners and other issues.
“I look at this and I think back what could I have done during my presidency to move this forward — as hard as I tried, I’ve got the scars to prove it,” Obama said in excerpts of interview released on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
The entire interview is scheduled to be released on Tuesday.