Foreign Sec: Hamas is prolonging war with Israel

ODN

The foreign secretary says he does not want the Israel-Hamas war "to go on for a moment longer than necessary", but accuses Hamas of "prolonging this conflict". Speaking at the Foreign Affairs Committee Lord David Cameron Hamas could "end this tommorrow, they could lay down their arms, they could leave Gaza". Report by Brooksl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn

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00:00 I want this conflict to end as soon as possible. I don't want to go on for a moment longer than

00:04 necessary. But a ceasefire to work has got to be sustainable. That means you can't have Hamas in

00:09 power, able to launch rockets, not releasing hostages. That has got to be dealt with.

00:13 And I think you get...

00:15 On the foreign secretary, do you believe that military intervention can defeat Hamas?

00:20 I think that what the Israelis are trying to do is they are trying to get rid of Hamas's ability

00:30 to launch further attacks on Israel. I think you can do that. And one can disagree,

00:37 and I would have, differences with the way they've gone about it.

00:40 Can you defeat an ideology through armed intervention? No, defeating an ideology is

00:49 going to take a lot of other things, including progress towards a political solution to show that

00:54 politics can work and deliver things. But I think if you take the argument, there's nothing more

01:03 that can be done militarily. You just have to freeze things where we are now. You've then got

01:08 to make an argument, well, how do you get the remainder of Hamas out of Gaza, get rid of the

01:14 rocket launchers, get rid of the... And my challenge to those from the global south or

01:20 friends in Arab states is to say, "Okay, there's a ceasefire tomorrow. How do you get rid of Hamas's

01:25 capacity to launch more rockets?" How will you know when that moment has come as British foreign

01:31 secretary? And is it your hope that the UK will be voting for a ceasefire at the UN in the near

01:37 future? I would hope that we will. We'll be voting. I mean, what we did is we defined what we wanted

01:43 as a sustainable ceasefire. The prime minister said that at Prime Minister's Questions. And

01:47 within a few weeks, that was adopted by the UN in Resolution 2720 with unanimous... Well,

01:55 not unanimous agreement because the United States didn't vote in favor, but without a veto.

01:58 So that's our position. Yes, I look forward to the moment when this conflict is over.

02:04 And of course, we spend a lot of time asking what Israel should do next to bring this to an end,

02:10 to finish... We should also spend a nanosecond saying, "If Hamas wanted, they could end this

02:16 tomorrow. They could lay down their arms. They could leave Gaza. They are the ones prolonging

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