“The time for [action in] the north has come,” said Gantz on Sunday during the Middle East America Dialogue (MEAD) summit in Washington, DC, adding, “Actually, I think we are late on this.”
“We need to ensure that we can return residents to their homes. We can achieve this goal, even if it requires striking Lebanon itself. Unfortunately, I don’t see another way,” he said, according to the Israel Hayom daily.
Some tens of thousands of Israelis remain evacuated from their homes in the north, after Israeli authorities cleared out the border area with Lebanon in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack last year, which was quickly followed by Hezbollah rocket attacks that have continued on a near-daily basis since.
On the first day of the two-day Washington conference chaired by two former senior US administration officials (Dennis Ross and Elliot Abrams) and two former American ambassadors to Israel (Tom Nides and David Friedman), Gantz said on Sunday that the decision to evacuate most of those northern residents had been a mistake, saying, “We should have only evacuated the communities and kibbutzim right next to the border.” READ MORE
