The news that 240 terrorists were captured in Gaza this weekend shows the threat still remains more than a year after the war started and that the fight will continue, Ofir Akunis, the consul general of Israel in New York, said on Newsmax Sunday.
"So we can't [tell] ourselves that they won't be there anymore," Akunis explained on Newsmax's "Sunday Report." "And as you know, we have the front in Lebanon, we have the front in Syria and the front from Yemen."
He also stressed that it's not only the Houthis in Yemen that the concern, but the fact that the terrorists are an "Iranian unit" armed with Iranian missiles.
"Just 24 hours ago, they fired a ballistic missile from Yemen to Israel," said Akunis. "We will not accept it. We will respond."
Meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces will continue to push to defeat Hamas in the coming year, as well as its other enemies.
"You saw that the butcher from Damascus is not with us anymore," Akunis said. "We can do, and we will do, and we continue to do, whatever is necessary to defend our people."
And with President-elect Donald Trump, who has been "very clear about the hostages" that remain after the Hamas invasion, it will be important to keep Hamas under pressure but not Israel, said Akunis.
"When the international community put Israel under pressure, Hamas saw it and was saying to themselves Israel is under pressure …we don't need to do anything,'" he added.
And the new message, with Trump coming into office, is that Israel's enemies must be "afraid from the United States and from us as well," said Akunis. "It can be a situation that the policy is to balance all the time between Israel and the terrorists because that was a message to the terrorists.
"Now, the message to Hamas is very clear. I don't know if the deal will happen … we want the deal. We want the hostages. We want them, you know, with the families in their homeland."
But Hamas is "playing their games as usual," but with the new year, "I hope that we'll see results," he said.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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