With diplomacy looking likely to fail in Gaza, retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Blaine Holt and retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told Newsmax it's time for a military solution to end the long-running war between Israel and Hamas.
"When you saw Ambassador [Steve] Witkoff pull away, that really is the green light from President [Donald] Trump saying, 'Look, I have done everything I can diplomatically to try to off-ramp this and get the hostages home,'" Holt said Monday on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "I'm certain that they've consulted with the Arab states, Qatar and other players around the region like Turkey, to say, 'Look, we've tried all these in-good-faith ways with the terrorist organization, and it got to the place we told you it would get to.'
"And so now, the hunt is on, tactically, for those on the ground who are Hamas. But it's not going to stop there – it's going to go right on to the leaders. Those billionaires from Hamas who are sitting on their yachts going, 'Wow, how's the war going today and the misery on the ground in Gaza?' So, it's now going to be done a different way, and it's going to be quite military, and hopefully, it's swift and it minimizes suffering, and we can get some hostages back in the process."
Shaffer said that Hamas is a political group whose "primary focus is to destroy its neighbor," Israel, which means that "there are no alternatives to the ending of Hamas as an organization."
"The question now has to become, what does a post-Hamas area look like?" Shaffer said. "What does it look like to have, essentially, do we have an element from the West Bank come in? The Palestinian Authority, do they come in? Do we have an Egyptian hybrid working with the Israelis to bring governance to Gaza? We don't know, but the bottom line is Hamas has to go. The people who were in Hamas have to be essentially either killed or captured. I don't think there's any alternative left at this point but to move forward with the military solution."
The problem when politicians involve themselves in fighting wars, Holt said, is that "the military side of it... gets refracted and twisted."
"We've seen this through American wars ever since World War II," Holt said. "Then go look at our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan that did not lead to not only acceptable terms, but we have so much more terrorism in the world now than we had on 9/11, it's not even funny. We've lost life, limb, and treasure. When you hand a mission over to the generals, to the strategists, then let them execute the mission, as long as it's within the parameters of the laws of armed conflict.
"But, if you're not going to do that, if you don't have an end in sight when you start the planning of it, then you probably ought not to go that route," he said. "And in the Biden administration, what did we see? Festering in Ukraine, drip logistics, inability to stand by Israel when they needed us right up front and micromanaging everything. [Washington] D.C. thinks they're very clever at this and, honestly, they're just incompetent."
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Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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