Former President George W. Bush gave his first public comments on the Hamas terror attack on Israel, warning that “it’s going to be ugly for a while.”
Mr. Bush, who guided the U.S. through the September 11 terror attack, told presidential historian Mark Updegrove in a private event Tuesday that “we need to support Israel. No ands, ifs, or buts.”
In a video from the event in California that was obtained by Axios, Mr. Bush decried the Hamas rampage in Israel as an “unprovoked attack by terrorists.”
“People willing to kill innocent people to achieve an objective,” he said.
Mr. Bush said negotiating is not an option for Israel.
“These people have played their cards. They want to kill as many Israelis as they can,” he said of Hamas. “Negotiating with killers is not an option for the elected government of Israel.”
“My view is: One side is guilty. And it’s not Israel,” he said.
The former president said that he is not privy to intelligence information anymore, so he doesn’t know whether Iran was involved, but he said he wouldn’t be surprised if they were.
Mr. Bush called himself “kind of a hardliner” because he “never thought we should try to accommodate Iran in any way, shape, or form.”
“I always felt the objective ought to be to prevent them from getting nuclear weapons to prevent a cataclysmic event in the Middle East,” he said. “And these are the kind of people that, if you show softness, they will take advantage of it.”
He praised President Biden for his “pretty bold statement” in response to the attack and said that the administration started “off on the right foot.”
Mr. Bush also said the response to Hamas and the political fallout would be hard on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he has known for at least 25 years.
“We’ll find out what he’s made of,” he said of the prime minister.
“It’s gonna be awfully difficult on the prime minister, but he’s got to do it,” Mr. Bush said. “He’s got to do this. You’re dealing with cold-blooded killers.”
Thousands of people have died from both sides, including more than two dozen Americans.
Mr. Bush was president during the Gaza War in 2008. It lasted less than a month before a ceasefire was agreed upon. More than 1,000 Palestinians died and roughly 13 Israelis.
