Israel envoy seeks hostages ‘at any cost,’ says Canada has strained ties

OTTAWA — Israel’s ambassador to Canada says the war that started a year ago has profoundly changed Israelis’ views on peace in the Middle East — and strained his country’s long-standing strong relationship with Canada.

In a recent interview with The Canadian Press a year after the Hamas attack on Israel, Iddo Moed said the war has united Israelis across the political spectrum in solidarity, but has caused confusion about Canada’s stance on the conflict.

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“We want our hostages back at any cost,” Moed said.

“We are in a historical point in time, where principled decisions have to be made, where our moral compass should point us to the same direction.”

Last October, militants from Hamas and its affiliates in the Gaza Strip stormed the border with Israel, killing 1,200 civilians and soldiers while abducting another 250 people, in what was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

The following month, Israel’s foreign ministry screened videos to foreign journalists of grenades tossed into a bomb shelter where a family hid, point-blank executions and severely burned bodies with their hands tied.

The footage included militants grinning and chanting as they drove terrified Israelis into Gaza.

These ghastly images were shared widely through WhatsApp, and have filled Israelis with grief and rage.

“We are traumatized by Oct. 7. We are still coming to terms with what took place there — with the expression of violent and barbaric hatred,” Moed said.

Israel mounted a ground campaign in Gaza with the goal of defeating Hamas, though it has never specified its metric for victory.

The Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza says the war has killed more than 43,000 people in the territory, including combatants. United Nations officials say nowhere is safe as the Israeli military continually demands Palestinians evacuate to areas they often end up bombing.

The war has produced a daily onslaught of gruesome images from Gaza of bombed-out refugee camps, ashen children missing limbs and hospital patients set ablaze.

Ottawa has voiced concerns that Israel could be exceeding its right to self-defence and could be violating international humanitarian law — a claim Israel rejects.

Moed said Israeli society has broadly coalesced around the need to defeat Hamas, though polling shows a deep split in Israel as to whether the war is worth continuing.

The ambassador noted that his country is facing off with not just Hamas, but Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen and Iran’s military. “Israel is going through its toughest period since its creation,” he said.

Israeli communities near Gaza and Lebanon remain vacated, with families living in hotels that used to be replete with tourists. Israel’s central bank keeps trimming its economic growth forecast.

In Canada, humanitarian concerns about the war in Gaza led Parliament in March to vote to halt the approval of new military export permits to Israel, and Ottawa to review prior permits. Canada does not have a military embargo against Israel, but it has barred the use of Canadian arms in Gaza.

The same concerns have led Canada to abstain from voting on United Nations resolutions calling out Israel, after decades of voting down motions that Canada said were not balanced.

“This departure from a very principled position is very, very disappointing for us,” said Moed, arguing these resolutions don’t seek peace but instead aim “to weaken Israel diplomatically, politically, as much as possible.”

He took a similar view of Canada restoring funding to a UN agency for Palestinians, which the Canadian government says is indispensable for delivering life-saving aid in Gaza.

Israel claims that hundreds of Palestinian militants work for UNRWA, without providing evidence, and that more than a dozen employees took part in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel. UNRWA investigated 19 employees accused of taking part in the attack, and fired an unspecified number of them. The agency has 30,000 employees.

Moed did praise Canada for listing a branch of Iran’s military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as a terrorist organization in June after years of Conservative pressure.

He wants Ottawa “to lead other countries in the same path as Canada,” such as by sharing the information that led to the designation.

Overall, Moed suggested Canada’s stances on the Middle East would be more clear to Israelis if Ottawa offered “solutions for actual problems,” suggesting as an example deradicalization and demilitarization programs in Gaza when the war ends.

Canada has repeatedly said that long-term peace will only be possible if there is a Palestinian state — and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has undermined efforts at advancing Palestinian statehood.

Ireland, Spain and Norway expressed similar concerns in May when they formally recognized the State of Palestine. Most of South America, Africa and Asia have already done so, though few of Canada’s allies have.

In July, Israel’s parliament overwhelmingly rejected the idea of a two-state solution in a 68-9 vote.

Moed said advancing Palestinian statehood would only reward Hamas for its attack at a time when Israel is facing threats on multiple fronts. He said Israelis feel most Palestinians don’t respect the existence of the State of Israel, making it impossible to live in peace.

He claimed there is strong support among the Palestinian population for Hamas. “We don’t see leadership emerging on the Palestinian side that is able and capable of changing the mindset of the majority of Palestinians,” he said.

Israel has denounced Palestinian leaders for not condemning the Hamas attack last fall.

The Palestinian ambassador to Canada, Mona Abuamara, said peace can only be realized if people understand that Israel’s decades of occupation of Palestinian territories — along with the air, sea and ground blockade of Gaza — drove the accumulation of grievances leading up to the Hamas attack.

She argued that closing pathways to negotiations and failing to use non-violent tools like boycotts and sanctions leaves Palestinians resorting to what Western countries classify as terrorism, and other states deem to be armed resistance against violent occupation.

“It didn’t start on Oct. 7,” Abuamara said in an August interview with The Canadian Press.

“We need to have people understand that every life is worthy. We want everyone to be safe, we want everyone to be secure. But Israeli lives cannot be more important than Palestinian lives.”

Ottawa has stuck a similar tone in condemning far-right Israeli cabinet ministers who have voiced support for mobs seeking to free soldiers accused of perpetuating the filmed gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner.

Last month, an Israeli airstrike killed a Canadian couple in Lebanon who were trying to flee to safety. A Canadian was among a group of aid workers killed in Israel’s triple strike last April on a World Central Kitchen convoy that had been operating with Israeli approval.

Moed says the Israeli military is doing its best limit civilian casualties while routing “the sources of evil in the Middle East” that it believes are often deeply embedded in civilian areas.

“We are in an existential battle,” he said.

“We want to be able to look back 10 years from now in Israel, and say we did it according to the best moral values that we want to live by.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published October 31, 2024.

— With files from The Associated Press

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press