A former Israel Defense Forces combat reservist says that Hamas must be severely damaged after it carried out a terror attack at a music festival, killing hundreds of people.
Benjamin Anthony, who previously was a combat reservist in the IDF and served during the Second Lebanon War, Operation Pillar of Defense, and Operation Protective Edge, told Fox News Digital that Hamas’ capabilities must be limited.
“Hamas’s ideology is a genocidal ideology. It calls within the charter of Hamas for the destruction and murder of Jews wherever they may be. It calls for the complete destruction of the state of Israel, though it doesn’t name Israel specifically, rather all of the land that they define as Palestine, that sort of ideology,” Anthony said. “I don’t know that it can be destroyed, but I do know that it must be defanged.”
“And I have faith in the capabilities of the Israel Defense Forces now that we have been brought to full height and full readiness to defang this evil beast that is Hamas,” he added.
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Rockets are fired toward Israel from the Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair)
Anthony, who’s also the co-founder and CEO of the MirYam Institute, said that he has never seen anything similar to the Hamas terrorist attack.
“During my time in the Israel Defense Forces, I never saw anything that like the horrors that we’ve all borne witness to that took place inside the state of Israel emanating from the Gaza Strip at the hands of Hamas terrorists,” Anthony said. “This past Saturday morning, not only have I never seen anything like it, but quite frankly, I don’t think anybody’s seen anything like this since the horrific events of the horrors of the Holocaust and now the evil that is Hamas has come and must know it is on full view for the world to see it on full view, for the world to recognize. And it is on full view for the states of his own, the people of Israel, to counter and hopefully to destroy.”
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Israeli tanks head towards the Gaza Strip border in southern Israel on Thursday. (AP/Ohad Zwigenberg)
At least 1,300 Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed in the surprise attack and 2,215 Palestinians and Hamas terrorists have been killed.
Since then, protests have taken place at American cities and college campuses, many of them in support of Palestinians.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example, their Students for Justice in Palestine group called for a Day of Resistance on Thursday, asking students to wear masks and face coverings to the event.
The online post for the event read “From the river to the sea,” which according to the Anti-Defamation League, is understood as a call for “dismantling of the Jewish state.”
At another protest at Baruch College in New York City, signs held by protesters questioned the claim that IDF soldiers found beheaded infants.
Anthony, commenting on the protests, said he’s “appalled” by what’s going on at college campuses.
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Demonstrators attend an “emergency rally for Gaza” outside of the Israeli Consulate in New York City, New York on Monday, October 9, 2023. Supporters of both Palestine and Israel clashed at the event as Israel remains at war with Hamas. (Jennifer Mitchell for Fox News Digital)
“We’ve seen numerous students, organizations, including at Harvard University and at NYU, rise up and speak in defense of Hamas and its absolutely genocidal, cruel, wicked goals. I think that the situation on university campuses in the United States of America with regard to the state of Israel has been problematic for many, many years. It’s deteriorating and continues to deteriorate,” Anthony said.
Fox News’ Peter Aitken contributed to this report.
