Palestine urged to throw out Hamas

Peace will not be achieved until Palestinians ‘throw Hamas out’ amid the current ceasefire in Israel, acting Israeli Ambassador to Australia Jonathan Peled says.

Jonathan Peled is Israel's acting ambassador to Australia.

Peace will not be achieved until Palestinians “throw Hamas out” amid the current ceasefire in Israel, acting Israeli Ambassador to Australia Jonathan Peled says.

Mr Peled said Israel was “reluctant” to retake Gaza and pointed to three options moving forward.

“The first one is negotiation which obviously is not on the table. Hamas calls for the destruction of us — you can’t negotiate with somebody who wants to destruct you,” he told Sky News.

“The second option is what the Allies did during WWII when they basically razed cities, German and Japanese cities, that’s something, an option, which Israel would never even think of doing.

“That leaves us with really the only option on the table, which is to continue fighting Hamas, degrading its capabilities and trying and hoping that ­finally the moderates … will throw out Hamas that’s terrorising Israel and tyrannising Gaza.

“Throw Hamas out and the world will be a better place not only for Israelis but Palestinians as well.

“We shouldn’t forget Hamas is not only Israel’s enemy, it’s the enemy of the people of Gaza, it’s the enemy of the ­Palestinian people, it’s the enemy of all peace-seeking, dialogue and reconciliation people in the region.

“The people of Gaza are forgetting they have the cheapest, simplest, most effective Iron Dome in the world, and it’s called simply stop shooting.

“We wouldn’t need to develop and spend billions of dollars on an Iron Dome to protect ourselves in the first place had we not had this terrorist regime backed by Iran on our backdoor in the south of Israel.”