Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (Religious Zionism Party) said on Monday that should the war in Gaza resume, Israel’s approach would be “very aggressive.”
During a faction meeting of his Religious Zionism Party at the Knesset, Smotrich told JNS that this would involve not only targeting Hamas militarily, but also wresting administrative control from it.
Asked by JNS about the claim by former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Gadi Eizenkot on Monday that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have a combined fighting force of 30,000 men, Smotrich downplayed the significance of the number.
“The last thing that Hamas lacks in Gaza is fighters. What are fighters? They are men between the ages of 16 and 50—there are about half a million of them; I know how many are in the Gaza Strip—that is not what they lack,” said Smotrich.
Rather, it is Hamas’s military and governmental capabilities that need to be destroyed, he continued.
Avigdor Lieberman, who leads the opposition Yisrael Beiteinu Party and served as Israel’s defense minister between 2016 and 2018, told JNS on Monday afternoon that “in the last month, in the last few months, Hamas has managed to recruit more than 10,000 new recruits.”
Lieberman stressed that “even if we’re speaking about thousands,” Jerusalem should eliminate all new terrorist recruits “one by one.”
Smotrich lamented what he said was the failure of the army, singling out former IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. (res.) Herzi Halevi, who stepped down on March 5, to disrupt Hamas’s administrative control of the Strip.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office would not comment on the figures made public by Eizenkot, and the Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication.
Jerusalem has backed a proposal by U.S. Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff that would see the first phase of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire extended through the month of Ramadan, in exchange for the release by Hamas of 11 living captives and half of the bodies it is holding.
Hamas rejected the plan, insisting on advancing to Phase 2 of the truce deal. However, the gaps between the two sides remain wide; Witkoff’s bridging proposal is an attempt to prevent the total collapse of the ceasefire.
Smotrich and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have previously claimed that both U.S. President Donald Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden provided Jerusalem with a written guarantee that would be able to “return to the war on day 43" if talks failed during the 42-day first phase of the agreement, which concluded at midnight on March 1.
According to an internal Israel Defense Forces investigation made public late last month, some 5,500 Palestinian terrorists entered the Jewish state during the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack, alongside thousands of other unaffiliated “civilians” from the Strip.
