Edited by: TJVNews.com

(The following is the first part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address at the Conference of Presidents Summit in Jerusalem)

“You know I’ve been seeing you here year after year but this year it’s different. Each year you come here to express your solidarity with the state of Israel, the solidarity of the diaspora with the Jewish state but this year that solidarity is particularly important because it’s an expression of  unity between the Jewish people and the Jewish state; between so many of our friends around the world and the great trial that we are faced with today.  We have faced an attack of savagery that is unparallel since the Holocaust. We haven’t seen such cruelty  directed against the Jewish people since the Nazi Genocide. We’ve seen children murdered in front of their parents, parents murdered in front of their children, women raped and beheaded after being raped.

We’ve seen youngsters burned alive in death bits, we’ve seen mothers and babies kidnapped by these monsters. We’ve seen them rejoice over this savagery, something that even the Nazis refused to publicize but they came in these killers with GoPro cameras to proclaim to the world, to their people what kind of cruelty and what kind of inhumanity they were capable of.

With glee they showed this murderous, horrible action that puts us in front of a huge challenge and our challenge and our goal can be summarized in two words. Total Victory! Total Victory against these savages. It’s not just our battle, it’s not just our battle, it’s the battle of civilization against barbarism because if Hamas gets away with this, if the axis of Evil and Terror that Iran dominates in this world or seeks to dominate in the Middle East and it will expand everywhere and so this is a battle that is important for Israel’s future and our survival but it’s also critical for the future of civilization.

So, we set a goal of  total victory and that goal has three missions; one to destroy Hamas, second to free our hostages, all of our hostages and third, to ensure that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel. Now, when we set out to do this even our best friends said to us this can’t be done. They said, well, you know, if you go into a ground operation you run into horrible risks. If you go into Gaza City you’re going to go into horrible risks. If you go into Shifa Hospital you’re going to have to kill all the patients , you might kill all the patients and all the doctors and so many civilians. None of that happened. They said if you go into the tunnels and these are experienced people who were thinking about the best thing that they could offer, the best advice they could offer us, they said if you go into the tunnels these are death traps that are impossible.

Our soldiers are in the tunnels, our brave soldiers are in the tunnels demolishing the infrastructure of these killers .They’re doing things that were unbelievable and they’re doing so in exemplary action.  We’re doing that in standards that no Army has applied. It’s not only who say this .

You should read the words of Colonel John Spencer. He’s the head of urban Warfare at West Point. He toured several times in Iraq; he says the Israeli Army is going to lengths to prevent civilian casualties as no army, no military has done in comparable situations and he said there is no comparable situation in Gaza.  We’re facing 30,000 armed terrorists with an underground tunnel network of hundreds of kilometers, maybe 500 kilm.”