The only policy that makes sense for Isreal is the elimination of Hamas at its borders, and the fight will not end until that goal is reached, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Newsmax Sunday, the six-month anniversary of the deadly Hamas incursion.

“We have an organization that explicitly says it wants to wipe Israel off the earth,” Bennett told Newsmax’s “Sunday Agenda” anchor Lidia Curanaj. “Look, we Israelis don’t want war. I fought in wars. I lost my best friend in war. I’m about to send my oldest son to join Israel’s military unit. A fighter unit. Do you think I want this?”

But, Bennett said his message to Israel’s neighbors in Gaza is to “leave us alone.”

“We don’t want to fight with you,” he said. “We don’t want anything. But if you don’t leave us alone, we’re going to fight back.”

Israel, he added, has “made a mistake of too many years of accommodating and appeasing the other side.”

“That was a mistake,” said Bennett. “Oct. 7 shook us, woke us up, and we’re going to get the job [done]. Never again.”

Israel has come under worldwide fire for the ferocity of its attacks on Hamas in Gaza and the number of civilian deaths, but Bennett argued Sunday that “it’s not a matter of numbers.”

“If we were sticking to numbers, in Pearl Harbor, the Japanese killed 2,400 Americans and then America launched a full war until it achieved full Japanese defeat with millions of Japanese dead,” he said. “It’s not a numbers game. It’s about the fact that we have Hamas, which has had a state on Israel’s border, not thousands of miles away, but on our border.”

On Oct. 7, Hamas “went in and massacred young babies,” Bennett added. “Moms, dads, the worst atrocities that we’ve seen for many years, and it says it’s going to do it again until they destroy Israel. So we really have no choice.”

In war, he added, “civilians get killed,” but in Gaza, “we have fairly low deaths of civilians compared to deaths of militants.”

Still, he insisted that the civilian deaths are “the lowest ever internationally in all global crises … we’re being as cautious as we can. But there’s a double standard against Israel and we’re being asked to do the impossible, which is to defeat Hamas while they’re hiding behind their own families.”

Bennett also discussed the deaths of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers last week, calling it an “unfortunate event,” but the criticism Israel is getting is “way out of proportion to anything we’ve ever seen.”

“There was a place called the Kunduz in Afghanistan where there was a hospital of Doctors Without Borders and America bombed, mistakenly bombed this hospital and killed 42 civilians, including patients, including volunteers,” Bennett said. “No one’s heard of it. You’re not aware of it.”

But still, Israel mistakenly killed the seven aid workers, and it has taken responsibility, said Bennett. 

“That’s what happens in war, especially in a world where Hamas is using and deliberately using these aid people to hide behind them, to hide under them, to have terror tunnels under them, and this is their methodology,” he said. “So there’s a double standard against Israel, which is unacceptable. There are people who are using this unfortunate event to try and stop Israel from winning the war.”

Meanwhile, protesters are hitting America’s streets, but the same outcry did not happen when the United States went after al-Qaida in Afghanistan for the 9/11 attacks, said Bennett.

“I was a New York on 9/11,” he said. “I was in midtown. I saw the towers burning. I remember the rivers of people walking north and there was more clarity. Everyone knew that al-Qaida is a horrific terror organization. It needs to be eliminated.”

With Hamas, “it should be the exact same,” he said. “Unfortunately across the world, more and more people say Hamas is legitimate. It’s OK to stop the war to stop Israel from winning the war. It’s not that important. Too many people are dying. That’s unacceptable. A lot of innocent people died in World War II Germany, and in Japan, and in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. That’s unfortunately what happens in war.”

Also, al-Qaida was “half [across] the world” from the United States, while Hamas is on Israel’s border, said Bennett.

“Hamas is about an hour and 15 minutes away from my home in Ra’anana,” he said. “I’ve got four children. No one’s going to tell us to not defend ourselves. And even if they do, we will defend ourselves and we’ll do everything necessary to eliminate Hamas.”

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