U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee sits for an interview with NPR on Wednesday. Benny Doutsh for NPR hide caption
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Benny Doutsh for NPR
TEL AVIV, Israel — The new U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, told NPR he is “outraged” at the leaders of Britain, France and Canada for condemning Israel’s new military offensive in Gaza.
“ The prolonged suffering for everybody is on Hamas, and I’m outraged that the U.K., Canada, France, they’re blaming the wrong perpetrator,” Huckabee, the former Republican governor of Arkansas, said in an interview Wednesday at a U.S. Embassy office in Tel Aviv.
Israel launched an intensified offensive in Gaza on Sunday, ordering mass evacuations, stepping up airstrikes throughout the territory and killing hundreds of Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials. Under intense international pressure, Israel has begun to allow a small amount of aid into the enclave this week after imposing a total blockade on the entry of food, medicine and other goods for nearly three months — but the new aid has not yet been distributed to civilians in Gaza.
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The leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Canada say they strongly oppose the expansion of the war, issuing a joint statement this week that called Israel’s actions in Gaza “wholly disproportionate” and “egregious” and said the basic amount of food Israel has allowed in “wholly inadequate.”
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British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the government is suspending trade talks with Israel. The European Union is reviewing all political and economic agreements with the country, its foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas announced, saying, “The situation in Gaza is catastrophic.”
Huckabee said, “ I’m not in the position to tell the Israelis how to conduct their war. … My family members weren’t murdered and massacred, mutilated,” referring to the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed around 1,200 people in Israel.
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Citing the Allied bombings at the end of World War II, Huckabee said, “What a hypocrisy to say that those bombings that ultimately ended World War II and stopped the threat of the Nazis into all of Europe was somehow OK. But if the Israelis, you know, 70 years later, try to defend themselves from an existential threat, that we ought to be mad at them.”
He further said, “I just find that so disgustingly hypocritical on the part of some of these European nations that forget their own history and it wasn’t that long ago, and they ought to just go back and maybe take 10th grade civics and refresh themselves.”
More than 53,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, according to health authorities in the territory.
Pope Leo XIV called the situation in Gaza “worrying and painful” and urged “an end the hostilities, the devastating price of which is paid by children, the elderly and the sick.”
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Huckabee denied media reports that President Trump was growing frustrated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for renewing the Gaza offensive in March, after a two-month ceasefire that Trump himself had called for in the run-up to his inauguration this year.
“I don’t see the frustration with the prime minister, and I’ve talked to the president, I’ve talked to the vice president, talked to the secretary of state,” Huckabee said. “I think he’s more frustrated with Hamas.”
