AN Israeli MP has urged the UK politicians to be more like Donald Trump, praising the US president’s efforts to have hostages released.
Shelly Tal Meron, a member of the Knesset, addressed the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday and called on the UK Government to up its efforts to get Hamas to release Israeli hostages.
The MP, a member of the liberal Yesh Atid opposition party, said: “The international community and of course, the American involvement, is creating a change. We saw that president Trump was very involved, even before he came into office, with the release of the hostages and it did help us with releasing some of them.
“That is my request to the UK Government, to be very much involved when it comes to our hostages, of speaking of this issue and using your platforms to discuss the hostages because everybody’s speaking about what’s happening in Gaza – and I can understand the concerns that everybody has – but we need you to speak about the hostages and we need you to pressure Hamas and Qatar and the mediators and the international community to get involved in ending this.
“And that is my request to you because we’ve seen that the international influence is significant.”
Trump (above) has proposed the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip and described the territory – which he said could become the "Riviera of the Middle East" – as an "incredible piece of important real estate".
The MP, who served in the Israel Defence Forces for seven years, insisted that her country’s military did not target civilians – after she was questioned about figures which showed the death toll in Gaza had topped 51,000 people, around 70% of which are women and children.
Tal Meron said: “I think that the IDF tries its best not to harm civilians. It only targets terrorists, we do not target civilians. Yes, some of the civilians got hurt, I’m not saying they weren’t but we don’t target them.”
She added: “We do not aim at Palestinian civilians on purpose.”
Elsewhere, Tal Meron highlighted her party’s plans for peace, saying that Egypt should take over the Gaza Strip for eight to 15 years for “rehabilitation” and spoke of the need to “demilitarise” the territory from Hamas, echoing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government’s insistence that Hamas must be “eliminated”.
