TRANSCRIPT
Anna Henderson:
Can I firstly just get your assessment of the situation in Israel right now?
Christian Cantor:
Well, Anna, I think that everybody's looking at the news. What we know is that early Saturday, hundreds of Hamas terrorists infiltrated the sovereign territory of Israel into around 30 communities, civil communities in the Israeli territory. Around that time, Hamas launched parade of around 3,200 missiles, probably. Now we understand in order to divert attention, those infiltrations, those Hamasers entered Israel after they blew up fence, security fence, and part of them on motorcycles, some of them on vehicles, and started penetrating the different localities and different communities in Israel, going home by home, house, by house, evading, massacring, and killing people. The stories that were hearing and coming out from those communities are horrifying. There's no other way to describe this as war crimes. We're talking about little children, babies, whole families that were slaughtered. There's a story about a music festival that took place near those communities, a festival with 2000 people. We understand that hundreds of people were slaughtered just shot by the terrorists.
The situation in Israel today, as we understand stand, is we're counting the different numbers, but the numbers that the latest numbers we heard or we received was 700 people massacred, just to get the numbers, the proportions, because this is probably the worst national tragedy that Israel has gone through since the modern times. Just to get numbers in the head of Australians in nine 11, we're talking about 3000 casualties. If we take the events in Israel and trying to translate them to nine 11 terms, we're talking about seven nine elevens, 21,000 Americans dead. If we're taking that number and trying to compare it to Australian population, we're talking about 2000 Australian dead in one day.
The shock, the surprise and the scale are devastating as well as the nature. I mean, in the last two days, I can cut out of my mind the pictures of small babies taking hostages, put in siege in cages, women bodies, pronated, young women, screaming, taken by motorcyclists into Gaza, elderly women, some of them with dementia, that obviously from the pictures you understand that they have no idea what's going on. So we're talking about dozens of people that were abducted. The situation is such that the cabinet gathered, they declared war. We're in a war. I think that if there's a message to pass on is that this is not a normal, as absurd as I can say, a normal escalation between Israel and Hamas. It's not just another wave or another incident. What you're talking about devastating numbers and out of scale events, and this is the mindset that we're trying to get into. There's a massive mobilization in Israel. If you'll go to any one of the Israeli employees at the embassy, you'll hear stories about all their families. Recruited myself is part of that group. My son was recruited, and this is a difficult time to Israel.
Anna Henderson:
You've just spoken of such terror and devastation and loss of life over a civilian population. What do you say to those people watching an understandably, incredibly angry nation, but potentially about to inflict that same level of pain on another people.
Christian Cantor:
The cabinet gathered and published? The objectives are very clear to degrade Hamas from its operational and military capabilities in order to return safety to the Israeli citizens. This is what we're now concentrating on. There are still out of those hundreds of terrorists in South and Israel, there are still people walking for free, and therefore the idea F forces is trying to secure those communities. We are aware that we don't know how this objective will be translated into military operations, but I think that for all those that thought that there's a way to confront diplomatically Hamas, I think that the events of the last two days show that we're talking about bar barracks that are slaughtering kids. So the main,
Anna Henderson:
So how do you degrade Hamas but not have the collateral damage to the civilian population? Or is it a reality the way that Hamas lives in Gaza Strip and the way that the society is configured, that there will be civilian loss of life on the Palestinian side, and what kind of, I suppose, scale should the rest of the world be preparing for?
Christian Cantor:
So the answer is that I don't know. I'm not a military operative. I do know that they usually defense forces in the past and probably in the future, will do their utmost in order to target only those terrorists. But there is a clear moral and operational difference between people that take guns and kill small kids in front of their parents and between lives, innocent lives that probably or could be lost as part of a military operation. It's not the same. Let me be clear. The Israeli defense forces are not targeting civilians. They're targeting Hamas objectives, and they do their outmost in order to warn those civilians and operationally to try to limit the collateral damage.
Anna Henderson:
But you know, that roof tapping and some of those measures that the Israeli forces do take in these processes, it's not an exact science, and that there is a likelihood as well that with the hostages that have been taken, that the Israeli retaliation could in fact end up having an impact on Israeli civilians too. So how much is all of that weighing on this decision-making process?
Christian Cantor:
Well, you mentioned the tap on the roof. That's an excellent example because that's an easily measure that was adopted together with others, like calling specifically people's phones and houses and asking them to evacuate
In order to minimize the level and the amount of unnecessary victims. And this is a measure that the Australian armed forces are commending, that the international lawyers are commending now. I think that there's something to be said here. We do not live in the marvelous, amazing paradise, Australia. Yesterday, when after my son told me that he was recruited, I had to take a few moments. I stepped out of my house and start walking in Canberra just to take a fresh air. And to that moment I said, I live in a different world. We live in a tough neighborhood and we're confronting devils. There's no other way to describe those inhuman terrorists. I'm not talking about the Palestinians. I'm talking about Hamas. People asked me this morning, what are my reactions regarding some shows of festivity that were taken in different cities, in different communities in Australia?
And I said that there's no way that I cannot understand how a person can be happy when a young woman that went for a music festival was raped, dragged throughout the streets of Gaza Spitted on and profanated how someone could be happy or celebrate kids that are crying in front of their parents while kept in captivity after the terrorist showed their sister, and they're asking if they're going to be the next ones. This is a totally different level of cruelty. Now we have to understand that the Israeli psyche won't tolerate that. It's not an issue of toleration or acceptance. It's an issue of survival.
