Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee tours devastated Gaza community

“If we don’t stand with Israel, we stand for chaos,” former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee tells reporters in the Gaza border community of Kfar Aza on Wednesday, calling the experience of walking through the kibbutz decimated by Hamas on October 7 a “gut punch.”

In Israel on a pre-Christmas solidarity mission with a number of other prominent retired American evangelical politicians, Huckabee expresses the desire to serve as a witness to what happened there, explaining that he had to see the devastation with his own eyes.

Standing outside a row of burned and shattered homes 75 days after Hamas’s brutal attack, with artillery and machine gun fire in Gaza booming in the background, Huckabee, a long-time supporter of Israel, tells The Times of Israel that the 22-year old niece of an old friend was among those killed on October 7 and calls Hamas’s actions on that day “an act of barbarianism that the world shouldn’t have to deal with anymore.”

“This was a gut punch to see it up close. As governor I walked through scores of communities that had been hit by tornadoes, ripped apart and leveled to the ground. And I was used to seeing that kind of destruction but that’s because a weather system hit and hurt. What I’m seeing here happened because people who claimed to be human beings acted like something other than human beings and did an evil,” he says.

“I’m stunned,” agrees Sam Brownback, a former Kansas governor who also served as US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, standing amid the rubble and charred walls of the kibbutz’s Youth Village.

“I’ve been in Israel many times. I’m stunned at the demonstration of hatred, the depth of hatred, that you see here.”