Despite global calls for a ceasefire, Israel will not stop its airstrikes and operations in Gaza and Lebanon, said Israel’s newly-appointed Ambassador to India Reuven Azar. Speaking to The Hindu in an interview just ahead of the one year mark since the October 7 terror attacks, Ambassador Azar, who earlier served as Israel’s Deputy National Security Advisor, and Foreign Policy Advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said he still hopes to convince India to change its policy on funding UNRWA and not banning Hamas, and admits that regional connectivity projects like IMEEC have been stalled due to the war.
With the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, will Israel end operations on Lebanon- and agree to a ceasefire now?
The operations in Lebanon will end when the 70,000 Israeli residents of our communities in northern Israel will be able to return safely to their homes free from the threat of Hezbollah terrorists.
So the war will continue?
We have done what we had to, as a result of the fact that our army wasn’t big enough, and we could not simultaneously deal both with the Gaza strip and Lebanon. In the last year, we had to evacuate about 70,000 residents from the North (Israel-Lebanon border areas) because our defence systems, the Iron Dome and others could not defend border areas from direct fire and tank missiles. So, now that we have the attention span and the capability, we are now trying to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701, that says very clearly that Hezbollah forces are not allowed South of the Litani River.
We have opened with a series of attacks against Hezbollah, and we are going to continue escalating and putting pressure until they agree to the international consensus reached. We’ve been calling the people of South Lebanon to leave their houses as soon as possible, especially in those areas and those towns in which Hezbollah has embedded missiles inside homes.
Israel is willing to go and bomb them because they have missiles buried. Now that Lebanon is part of this war, would Qatar be a part of the war, as Hamas leaders live there?
Qatar is not attacking us with missiles. We are not an irrational country, we are a democracy, we only use force that is needed in order to prevent attacks against us or retaliate when we are being attacked. So countries that are not attacking us should not be concerned.
Nearly a year after the October 7 terror attacks, how close is Israel to achieving the goals it set out at the beginning: to eliminate Hamas, bring back the hostages, and ensure that Gaza cannot be a threat… and is there a timeline to the ceasefire which India has been calling for?
We have managed to remove the majority of military capability that Hamas had before the war. I’m talking about the capability to threaten Israel with thousands of rockets daily. We have cut their supply chains becausewe are sitting at the border with Sinai (Egypt). In addition to that, there were a lot of strategic tunnels, including attack tunnels and we’ve destroyed most of that. They are continuing to operate in a more sporadic way, attacking our forces, but unable to attack our border, unable to attack our villages.
As to the hostages, we’ve managed to bring back about 150. Mostly, as a part of the ceasefire deal (in December 2023) with Hamas and there were also some 25 that we managed to bring with IDF operations. But unfortunately, we still have 101 hostages in the hands of Hamas that we haven’t been managing to release. Our dilemma is the fact that we want to destroy Hamas, but we also want to bring back our hostages.
According to figures accepted by the UN, 40,000 people are dead, 15,000 children amongst them, 100 hostages, as you said, still remain in custody…is the human cost acceptable to Israel ?
The human cost is absolutely tragic. It’s really something that we didn’t want to do. And if you ask any Israel in the last 15 years, the last thing Israel wanted to do is to have to go back to Gaza after we left it in 2005 and this is actually one of the reasons that we were surprised on October 7. As far as the figures are concerned, we believe that they include people that died of natural causes. From their point of view, we have killed 40,000 civilians and no terrorists were killed, which is ridiculous. We have killed at least 15,000 Hamas and other terrorists, and about 5,000 civilians have died by misfired Hamas rockets, according to our estimates.
Now the reason that civilians were killed were as a result of the Hamas tactics. They were breaking any rule, any norm of humanity, operating from within hospitals, from within schools, from within civilian areas. We are taking a lot of precautions and working according to protocols, including hundreds of lawyers that sit in on every war and assist the military to decide when to strike and when not to strike.
If that is true, then why is the world asking Israel to stop? Why is India, the UN calling for a ceasefire?
The UN system is problematic, as it has a majority of countries that are hostile to Israel and they appoint people who are biased. It is a natural tendency of countries to try to promote a ceasefire, because they are concerned, and they have interests that they want to promote. But at the end of the day, when you look at the real situation on the ground, the powers that be, the United States, the West, India and other countries, understand that we have a right of self-defence.
There’s also the geopolitical cost for Israel: the Abraham accords have been put on hold, Countries like Ireland, Spain, Norway have now recognized Palestine. Plans like I2U2, YouTube and IMEC have gone into cold storage.
The underlying issue here is that despite this setback created by the war, the cooperation between Israel and its neighbours is increasing in the military and intelligence sphere, and for the first time in the history of the Middle East, the United States, Israel and moderate, pragmatic Arab countries have cooperated militarily to cope with the threat of Iran [when it sent missiles to Israel this year]. And there are some countries that are very short sighted, like the countries you mentioned, Spain, Ireland, etc, because apparently they don’t understand that.
They are recognising Palestine. India recognises Palestine.
But that was in another era. We think that in the current context, recognising Palestine in the context of the attacks of October 7th would actually send a message to the terrorists that they can continue doing this.
India abstained on a UNGA resolution last week that would have pushed for sanctions against Israel. Did you discuss the vote with your Indian counterparts?
We always have discussions, especially with our friends, and we are happy that India didn’t support this resolution.
However, India has voted against Israel on other resolutions in the past year. When Prime Minister Modi met with President Abbas last week he promised unwavering support to the people of Palestine, support for a two state solution, which your Knesset has rejected. Do you feel India’s support over the last year to Israel has been strained by the continuing violence and the lack of a ceasefire?
Well all countries are concerned about the prolongation of the war, but the answer to your question is, no. I think that the only things strained in this year [between India and Israel] are our regional projects. We have to wait until this conflict is over, and then re-engage in the building of this regional projects with India.
India has also not banned Hamas, or designated it as a terror organisation and it has increased its funding of UNRWA- these all run counter to what Israel has asked for…
I hope that we’ll be able to convince the Indian government, as we’ve done with other governments like the US government, to stop funding UNRWA. On Hamas, I will just say that this may take time, we will continue presenting our information, and it’s going to be up to the sovereign government [in India] to decide its policy.
A year since IMEEC was launched, the participating countries haven’t been able to meet because of the conflict- has IMEEC been shelved?
The vision of IMEEC continues to exist because of the very simple reason is that it makes sense, and it brings together a bunch of countries that are interested in creating connectivity. Israel began to speak about this vision since 2008. The Middle East is now divided into two parts. You have the crescent of chaos- Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and then you have this arc of stability (including UAE, KSA and Jordan).
India has good relations with Iran and all the others you mentioned.
But the question is, when you have a geopolitical project that you want to build to connect Asia with Europe, are you going to do that with Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq?
India is already part of INSTC and Chabahar with Iran….
Well, good luck with that. Any sustainable project needs two prerequisites, security and political stability. If [India concludes that it] can trust the security and political stability of Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, be my guest. We’re continuing our dialogue with the Indian government of the issue of IMEEC, and projects to create connectivity through this corridor. I’m sure that this will re-emerge once the war is over.
Israel has also been discussing schemes to bring Indian workers to Israel, particularly as many Palestinian work permits have been cancelled. How many have already gone?
At the moment there are about 10,000 Indian workers as part of two schemes- one through an inter-governmental mechanism and one with the private sector. We also hope that Indian companies will come to build infrastructure projects like the Metro in Israel and bring in their own skilled labour. We are both old peoples, but young countries. Eventually, we are a growing country and we lack a lot of workforce, so we are capable of employing hundreds of 1000s of people, Palestinians, Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, etc.
Regarding the work permits, we have the sovereign right to decide who we are going to allow into our country. We can, of course, you know, reemploy Palestinians when we have reached some stability.
What about safety? Has Israel given a commitment to India that these workers will not work at the borders, will not work in Gaza, will not work on settlements.
They are not going to work in places that are not safe- that is a commitment we have given.
