Former PM Olmert blasts Israel’s Gaza operation on the BBC, calling it “very close to a war crime” and a war “without purpose.”
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert lashed out at Israel during an interview with the BBC on Tuesday, claiming that what Israel “is doing now in Gaza, is very close to a war crime”.
Olmert further claimed that this is “a war without a purpose – a war without a chance of achieving anything that can save the lives of the hostages.”
The former Prime Minister asserted that the “obvious appearance” of the war in Gaza is that thousands of innocent Gazans are being killed, as well as many Israeli soldiers.
“From every point of view, this is obnoxious and outrageous. We are fighting the killers of Hamas, we are not fighting innocent civilians. And that has to be clear,” he told the BBC.
Olmert made similar comments to CNN this past November, advocating an immediate cessation of hostilities in the Gaza Strip and a move toward a preliminary agreement on the basis of a two-state solution.
“I thought, eight months ago, not a week ago, not two weeks ago, eight months ago I thought that it should have stopped. We have reached the point where we achieved most of what we had to achieve, which is to destroy the military capacity of Hamas,” he claimed at the time.
Olmert justified the immediate military response to the October 7, 2023 attack, before noting that because of the continuation of the war, Israeli soldiers and innocent Palestinian Arab civilians are being killed.
“Hamas is a terrorist, murderous organization. There is no question about it. They did something absolutely terrible. And there was — it was an inevitable reaction that Israel had to make. But we achieved most of what we can achieve in the military operation. We destroyed Hamas, we destroyed the tunnels, not 100 percent of them, but enough. We destroyed their weapons, their rockets, their bunkers, their command positions, everything.”
“Now, what happens is that we lose Israeli soldiers, we lose innocent Palestinians living in Gaza embedded with Hamas and, of course, it is a main reason for the growing number of innocent civilians being killed, but we are not going to get back the hostages if we do not stop the war.”
Previously, Olmert warned that a military operation in Rafah is not worth the cost of soldiers’ lives, uninvolved Gazans, and the hostages.
In an interview with TIME, Olmert said that he believes Israel will not achieve the absolute victory that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks of, but it might still be possible to save the lives of the hostages.
