Israeli Ambassador to Japan Gilad Cohen speaks to reporters at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo, Friday, Oct. 13, 2023. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
TOKYO — Israeli and Palestinian diplomats appeared before reporters in Japan’s capital to speak about the conflict their countries are engaged in and state their respective cases for war-weary Gaza.
Israel’s ambassador to Japan compared Hamas militants attacking his country to Islamic State, a brutal military group considered terrorists by the U.S., during a press conference Friday at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.
Ambassador Gilad Cohen talked about his country’s plans to respond to atrocities reportedly committed in Israel by Hamas, the governing Islamist party in Gaza, as grotesque images of those atrocities flashed across screens.
“We are at war that was imposed on us and waged on us by the Hamas terrorist organization,” he said. Hamas militants erupted Oct. 7 from Gaza, a coastal strip of land between Israel and Egypt that’s home to 2 million Palestinians.
The weekend attack killed more than 1,200 people. Hostages, including women, children and the elderly, taken to Gaza by Hamas are being tortured and raped, Cohen said.
“This horror is worse than ISIS,” he said, referring to Islamic State, which ruled over wide swathes of Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2019. “The modern world has never seen this type of brutality.”
Palestinian diplomat Waleed Siam speaks to reporters at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo, Friday, Oct. 13, 2023. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
Following Cohen at the correspondent’s club Friday, Palestinian diplomat Waleed Siam said he doesn’t represent Hamas and condemned the killing of civilians by Hamas and Israeli troops.
The conflict’s roots lie not in religion but in Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian land, Siam said.
“This violence has to stop on both sides,” he said.
“We respect the Israeli state, but they have not recognized the Palestinians,” he said. “Without a Palestinian state, believe me, there will never be any stability.”
More than 1,500 Palestinians have died in the conflict, more than half of them women and children, he said.
Cohen during his address praised messages of support for Israel this week from the United States, Japan and other countries.
“If we surrender now it will come to the doorstep of Japan, Australia and Europe,” he warned. “We are going to win this war … because we don’t have any other choice.”
The international community should treat Hamas the way it treats ISIS, Cohen said.
Defeating the militants in Gaza, where they’re surrounded by civilians, may resemble the challenge faced by a U.S.-led coalition that defeated ISIS in Iraq and Syria, he said.
“The Islamic State going into the population and trying to hide there and how do you uproot them … (while) trying to minimize … hurting civilians?” Cohen asked. “We are considering all options. We are looking at these kinds of things.”
Israel doesn’t see Palestinians or people living in Gaza as enemies, but Hamas is using them as human shields, he said.
Siam later countered that Japan and some countries in Asia and Europe can play a neutral role in the conflict but not the United States. The U.S. Navy has positioned the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford in the Eastern Mediterranean in response to the conflict. The carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower may deploy there by Tuesday.
“How can they want to stabilize peace in the area when they are sending … war carriers to the Mediterranean and they’re sending specialists in urban conflict … helping the Israelis to learn how to fight in the urban fight, which is fighting the Palestinians?” Siam asked.
