Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer has said that an IDF military campaign to destroy  Hamas in Rafah must take plan, even if it harms country’s relations with the US and isolates it on the international stage.

“We’re gonna go in and finish this job, and anybody who doesn’t understand that doesn’t understand that the nerve of the Jews, that existential nerve, was touched” by Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, which sparked the Gaza war,” Dermer said.

The Rafah operation is “going to happen, and it will happen, even if Israel is forced to fight alone, even if the entire world turns on Israel, including the United States,” he added.

Israel is determined to destroy Hamas, even if it “leads to a potential breach with the United States,” Dermer further said.

In Egypt’s Cairo, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the Biden administration does not support a major Rafah operation.

“We will listen to what they have to say,” Dermer said, but a major military operation in Rafah is the only way to destroy Hamas.