Amb. Michael Oren: There's an entire other city beneath Gaza

Ambassador, welcome back to the Brian Kilmeach Show. It was good to be back with you, Brian. Ambassador, first off, I know how challenging this has been for you, but from where are you right now and still in Israel?

Yeah, sure. I'm in Southern Tel Aviv. We've had about three major barrages this afternoon.

At you? One of them actually hit close by here, Shookville House. But Iron Dome is doing its job. It's only, you know, it's 90% effective. So if they're firing 100 rockets at, it'd be 10 gets through, right? One of these rockets takes down an entire apartment building.

So it's not, you know, it's not pinprick. What direction is it coming from? From Gaza or from? From Gaza. These are from Gaza for the time being. So they're still able to shoot rockets off, even though there's been hundreds of thousands of strikes on Gaza at this hour. They're still there. They are not running.

First of all, there's nowhere to run to. But beside that, they're kind of trapped in there. But no, they have an amazing, you know, very deeply dug in missile capacity. These are not like the launchers that are above ground. They're beneath the ground and the ground opens up and the rockets fire out. They made those launchers.

That's pretty amazing. So they're not just sitting there with launchers that you set up and shoot in the middle of a battlefield. This is not Ukraine. This is something very different. Beneath Gaza is an entire city. Dozens, maybe hundreds of kilometers of tunnels and bunkers. So at the end of the third week of the war, you've now upped the number of hostages, unless you want to up it again or lessen it, at 229. Because it's not clear who was killed and who was taken. And I think at last count, there was at least 15 bodies that were unidentifiable.

I'm not sure if you're working that number down, but the number's at 229. Are you making, would you say you're making progress that you know of of finding out where they might be located? I don't know. And if I did know, I probably wouldn't be saying it on radio.

But it's very difficult. You know, many years ago we had a prisoner named Gilad Shalit. He was five years in Hamas captivity.

We couldn't find him. That's how labyrinthine, this subterranean city is. And who knows? He's in some. These people are held in different places. Not all of them are not held by Hamas. Some of them are held by, some of the houses are held by Palestinian Islamic jihad. And believe it or not, Brian, some of them are held by families.

It's a family hostage because Palestinians who are not actual members of Hamas crossed into the border that day, took hostages and then took them back. And they are for sale for sale. Yeah, they're for sale. Yeah, they're for sale. They will sell them to Hamas.

That's amazing. So they'll take them, now they're taking care of them. From the four hostages that got out, were they able to give you anything of interest? I'm sure that they were briefed, debriefed very extensively. See, you know, maybe they can describe where they were.

Maybe they can describe who they saw. But you know, Hamas is very, very smart. Never underestimate, as totally beastly and monstrous, and they are monstrous. I don't call them animals because I don't want to insult the animals. As monstrous as they are, they are smart.

They're very smart. And so the hostages they released were the hostages that were guaranteed to give them high, very high profile. And to increase pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire, to impose a ceasefire. Now a ceasefire, you understand, means victory for Hamas.

Absolutely. That means Hamas gets away literally with murder, murdering 1400 people in the most brutal fashion you could ever possibly imagine. And it means that we can't restore our security. It means we can't restore our deterrence power. It means we can't live here. It literally renders this place pretty much uninhabitable. I mean, would you want to raise your kids in a country, you know, it's the size of New Jersey, it's not that big, where there is a huge terrorist attack, both to the north and the south, who have emerged victorious and are, you know, they're just going to rebuild their capacities their capacities and they're going to attack again. I mean, really, who could live in a country like that?

Very difficult. And that's their disinformation campaign worked. They made it seem like they had no more interest in necessarily forcing you guys out of your land. There was indications from people like Jake Sullivan that the Middle East has taken less of his time than ever be all of his predecessors before, because and the Palestinians said, don't worry about us, we'll be fine. And people started looking elsewhere and thinking more of the possibilities with the expanding the Abraham Accords. That was part of the disinformation campaign.

Then we find out they were using hardline phones so you couldn't even pick up intercepts. So in that way, they show an additional sophistication that many didn't expect. Very sophisticated. I think they had some significant help from Iran. Do not underestimate them. Don't underestimate. Don't underestimate their inhumanity, but don't also interest their intelligence. And they're smart. And how they got around, you know, our very sophisticated fence, how they managed to shut off electricity and knock out cameras and, yep, sophisticated.

But at the end of the day, we're going to crush them because we have no choice. And the big challenge here is not necessarily defeating Hamas. The big challenge will be resisting rising international pressure for a ceasefire from the Fox News Podcast Network. I'm Ben Domenech, Fox News contributor and editor of the transom dot com daily newsletter. And I'm inviting you to join a conversation every week. It's the Ben Domenech podcast.

Subscribe and listen now by going to Fox News podcast dot com. And each day that goes by, as you make guys like your job harder with an ambassador now, but you're always working it, letting people know what's really happening. Does it make it harder? Yeah, sure it will. Especially if the narrative changes. I mean, we had a certain grace period because so many of our people were killed.

You killed so, so horrifically. But now the, the narrative is changing to Palestinian suffering. So right after this, the radio interview with the BBC of London, and that's going to be just an awful interview. They're going to say, how can you do this to the Palestinians?

How can you do this appearance? How can you be so cruel and inhumane? That's going to be the narrative. So my job is to create, I think, time and space, time and space for our armed forces to do what they have to do in order for us to survive. And none of us have any jobs. I listen, I, I'm, you know, an old soldier.

I was 35 years in the military and the paratroopers, and I'd much rather be out there with those guys doing this, but this is my job now. Right. Which is pretty amazing to see, to see that there's so many protests popping up. I saw a hundred thousand people in the UK protesting for the Palestinians, who prior to October, October 7th, I didn't see any of them.

I mean, there was no movement in America among college campuses to go protest for a Palestinian state. How do you explain this, Ambassador, that we're watching these horrific scenes? Do you know what the message is?

If you are Jewish, don't go out on Saturday if you're in Brooklyn. Can you believe this? I think it's even deeper than that. There's obviously a huge anti-Semitic element to this, but it's even deeper. I think there's a tremendous amount of self-hatred in it. It's hating your own civilization. This is not a war between Israel and Hamas, maybe not even principally. It's a war between Israel as a civilization and darkness and evil. Hamas is the exact same organization as ISIS, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda. They all have the same theology. They want to overtake the world and create a universal caliphate based on Islamic law. That's what they want.

I'm not making this up. And so what is standing against us in the first line is the state of Israel. But America's next, Europe's next. So the people are protesting in favor of Hamas. Hamas, if you're a gay person, you're going to get hanged.

If you're a woman who's seen out walking with a man and you're not married and he's not married, you're going to be dead. I mean, really, the zero rights for anybody. Who would support that culture? Who in the West would support that culture?

The only people who hate, well, they hate Jews, but they hate themselves. I mean, that's what I'm saying on BBC. You guys, how much do you really hate your own civilization? I mean, is that what you want? I guess you want your civilization to die. And maybe you want to live under that type of regime. Maybe, you know, you want to live in a regime if you're a woman who has zero rights. And maybe you want to be in a regime where you could be beheaded for blasphemy. I mean, really.

It's insane. I want to hear what a lot of people are saying that are naive. They don't understand the Balfour Declaration. They don't understand what Israel came from.

They certainly don't understand what happened thousands of years ago. But here's the here's President Biden. And I know it doesn't work on your best interest to contradict the president.

But I think you have to hear a cut three. It also means that when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next. And in our view, it has to be a two state solution. It means a concentrated effort for all the parties, Israelis, Palestinians, regional partners, global leaders to put us on a path toward peace. And a two state solution.

Is that they insane? You're going to allow the West Bank to be a state and linked to Gaza. And we're going to pretend this is going to work. Listen, you know, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, that's in the West Bank, we call it the in Samaria, is in the 18th year of his fourth term. He will not stand for reelection because he knows that Hamas would win in the West Bank. So unless the president has an idea of how to get around that, the fact that the Palestinians actually like Hamas and will vote Hamas into office, I don't think that the two state solution is a starter. I mean, there are many ways you can work to improve the situation here and manage it much better. You can give a Palestinians a type of a diplomatic horizon. But right now, you put a state there, that state's going to become another Gaza within within a week, especially if the Israeli army pulls out of it, because what keeps Mahmoud Abbas alive is our armed forces. Right.

And I don't think you want that. So the problem is that everyone's been stuck on this two state solution thing for now over 30 years. And it fails over and over and over again. And, you know, you know, it's what Albert Einstein called the definition of insanity. People try to do the same thing over and over again, thinking you're going to get a different result.

You're not going to get different results. So, you know, as long as everyone's stuck on that formula, we're not going to get anywhere. But there are other ways you could look at trustee shifts, you could look at cantonment, you can look at federal solutions, all different ways you can go. But the two states was never going to happen.

And why do that? But I understand politically why the president has to do it, because that's the position of his party and the progressive wing of his party. The progressive wing of his party does not want to support Israel. Only 46 percent approve of Israel on the Democratic Party.

Yet they get about, I think, 70 percent of the American Jewish vote. I know you've dealt with this a lot. How do you maybe hired?

So how do you how do you how do you gel those two? Well, I'll give you my own party, my own family, got a lot of family in the states. And, you know, they're all I don't I don't know if there's a Republican, the whole family.

I really don't see as he's like not coming out of the basement. And and they love Israel. My family, most of them love me. They care, but they have other orders of priority. They're very liberal in their outlook. They care about the composition of the Supreme Court. They care about social issues. And so their value system more closely aligns with the Democratic Party. That may shift.

We have to say it may shift. Depends if the party, if the party becomes, you know, dominated by that progressive sort of wing of the party, which is more socialist, very critical of Israel and critical of the United States, because my my family, whatever. Our father passed away two years ago, landed on Normandy Beach, was a great patriot, war hero. And America was everything to him. And so he flies that flag outside the flag. We still have the flag outside of my parents house. My mother's still living there. You know, the family for all their liberal values is deeply, deeply patriotic and will not go in the direction of a party that is not does not love the United States of America.

It's it's insane. Ambassador, you have to keep keep fighting because you're on the right side of it. And any blood that happens in Gaza, tragic, not an aim, not an objective unless you're Hamas. But the blood is on Hamas's hands.

They did this. Definitely. And that's that's what everyone should realize.

And I'm embarrassed by what's happening here with these college kids in America. Thanks so much for what you do, Ambassador. All right. Thank you. And have a quiet good weekend. All right. You know, beat up on the BBC if you can. Listen to this show ad free on Fox News Podcast Plus on Apple Podcast, Amazon Music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.