Gantz says military focus should shift from Gaza to Lebanon: ‘We’re late on this’
At Washington summit, National Unity chair says ‘story of Hamas is old news,’ while hostage point man Gal Hirsch says terror group unmotivated to strike deal when pressure is on Israel
Former war cabinet member Benny Gantz on Sunday said Israel should shift its focus toward Hezbollah and the Lebanese border, warning that “we are late on this,” while also warning that a war with the Iran-backed terror group is imminent if Israel does not soon strike a hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas in Gaza.
“The time for [action in] the north has come,” said Gantz on Sunday during the Middle East America Dialogue (MEAD) summit in Washington, DC, adding, “Actually, I think we are late on this.”
“We need to ensure that we can return residents to their homes. We can achieve this goal, even if it requires striking Lebanon itself. Unfortunately, I don’t see another way,” he said, according to the Israel Hayom daily.
Some tens of thousands of Israelis remain evacuated from their homes in the north, after Israeli authorities cleared out the border area with Lebanon in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack last year, which was quickly followed by Hezbollah rocket attacks that have continued on a near-daily basis since.
On the first day of the two-day Washington conference chaired by two former senior US administration officials (Dennis Ross and Elliot Abrams) and two former American ambassadors to Israel (Tom Nides and David Friedman), Gantz said on Sunday that the decision to evacuate most of those northern residents had been a mistake, saying, “We should have only evacuated the communities and kibbutzim right next to the border.”
Gantz, who was a member of the small war cabinet created on October 11 to manage the campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah until he bolted the coalition in June, took a measure of personal responsibility for the decision, which he said “stemmed from the insecurity we experienced at the beginning of the war.”
Now, by contrast, “the story of Hamas is old news,” Gantz said. “The story of Iran and its proxies all around the area and what they are trying to do is the real issue.”
Still, the National Unity leader said he would prefer to reach a hostage-ceasefire deal in Gaza, to return Israeli captives and restore at least a temporary calm, even if it meant forgoing a major operation against Hezbollah in the north.
Also speaking at the closed-door conference, Gal Hirsch, the government point man on the ongoing hostage crisis, said that the terror group is not actually interested in negotiating, and only seeks to “exhaust” Israelis, especially when international pressure is placed on Jerusalem to make concessions.
There is a “direct line” between international pressure on Israel and Hamas’s lack of interest in signing a deal, Hirsch said, according to the Walla news site.
American officials and others have accused Netanyahu of being too inflexible in negotiations with Hamas, particularly after the recent murder of six Israeli hostages, whose bodies were recovered last Saturday from a tunnel in southern Gaza’s Rafah.
Hirsch addressed this narrative, insisting that the accusation that Israel is the one preventing a deal is a “lie,” and asserting that Israel has never rejected a deal that was actually on the table.
It is believed that 97 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 33 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Netanyahu has been accused of sabotaging a deal based on a framework presented in May, which consisted of three phases, with hostages gradually released during a temporary ceasefire, alongside negotiations for a permanent cessation of hostilities.
The prime minister has insisted that Israel be allowed a long-term security presence along the Gaza-Egypt border, called the Philadelphi Corridor, a stipulation not made in the May framework.
Saudi, Moroccan and Bahraini ambassadors
The Washington conference also hosted Saudi ambassador to the US Princess Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, who addressed a room “full of Israelis,” according to reporter Barak Ravid.
Al Saud took part in a panel alongside the Moroccan and Bahraini ambassadors to the US.
Hebrew media outlets hailed her speech as “inspiring”; the contents of the panel’s discussion and photos of the event were barred from publication.
The conference was held 11 months after the Hamas terror group attacked Israel on October 7 last year, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, starting the ongoing war and putting normalization efforts between Israel and the Arab kingdom on the back burner.
Hebrew media outlets on Monday cited an unnamed senior Israeli official as speculating that a normalization deal could still be clinched in the lame-duck period between the November 5 election and the January 20 swearing-in of the new American president.
The official stressed, however, that this would require a ceasefire in Gaza and some sort of vision to resolve the Palestinian issue.
