People entering and leaving Gaza through the Rafah border crossing have to “be properly vetted so that you don’t bring terrorists in or take terrorists out,” US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told Public Broadcasting Service in a Friday interview.
“There’s a legitimately diligent effort to get this done. But we’re talking about people who are vastly displaced, because Hamas extended this war long before it should have been extended,” he told PBS’s Geoff Bennett.
He went on to explain that Hamas “could have ended this long before the destruction, but they wanted to hold hostages and torture them and starve them and make it difficult for them.”
“I’m hoping that, once they’re disarmed and we get rid of them, things will progress much more rapidly,” Huckabee added.
Board of Peace, United Nations, and future of Gaza
When asked about the Gaza Board of Peace (BoP), the US ambassador said that the difference in this instance is that people working on it “want to actually do some heavy lifting and make Gaza livable again.”
“I don’t know of any other organization internationally that is that committed to doing something right. We saw here in Israel what happened when the United Nations was in charge of the food program.
“It was absolutely dismal; 92% of the food that was supposed to go to people who were hungry ended up getting looted or stolen or hijacked,” he said.
According to Huckabee – who added that he was “not a big fan of the UN” – the current international organizations are cumbersome, expensive, and ineffective.
“But there needs to be a much leaner operation in order to get Gaza on its feet. And I think that it’s not something that you can just say to nations, say to Iran or North Korea, I’m sure you guys will have a really noble experiment here, and you will want to do it the right way,” he said.
He concluded by explaining that the BoP will include not only people who want to work on the Gaza situation but also those who “meet the criteria of wanting to do it right.”