(NPR) Steve Inskeep - Amb. Dennis Ross, who served as a Middle East envoy in the past to presidents of both parties, told NPR: "Israel withdrew from Gaza...it withdrew entirely, and now in this week has taken more than 3,200 rockets. So I think [President Biden] is very sympathetic to the reality that Israel withdraws from the territory and what it gets is rockets in return. And he sees that what Hamas is doing has nothing to do with the well-being of the people in Gaza. It has everything to do with being able to inflict pain on the Israelis. And I think he's quite sympathetic to the idea that Israel should have the right to defend itself." "He looks at what Hamas does, what it represents, that it isn't committed to coexistence at all, and I think that's what's guiding him probably more than anything else - plus a historic sense of a partnership with Israel and his belief that Israel remains the one true democracy in the region." "In the aftermath of this, as it relates to Gaza, we should mobilize...major international participation to reconstruct Gaza, to do the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for Gaza on one condition...Hamas has to give up its rockets. No one is going to invest in Gaza if Hamas at any point keeps its rockets and can launch against Israel and Israel responds and destroys the investment."
2021-05-19 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive