Hamas official Saleh Arouri, who was reportedly killed in an explosion in Beirut, was "one of the biggest bastards around," according former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Newsmax.
"It's great that he's gone," Bennett told Tuesday's "Newsline," although, admitting as the news broke about the death of one of the founders of the Hamas military wing, "I'm not in a position to confer or deny the actual event."
"I can tell you that Saleh Arouri is one of the biggest bastards around, a very senior Hamas terrorist responsible for the deaths of uncounted lives," Bennett told host Bianca de la Garza. "So he's an archterrorist and if he's gone, it's great that he's gone."
The TV station operated by Lebanon's Hezbollah group, said Arouri died in a blast carried out by an Israeli drone strike in a southern Beirut suburb along with four others.
Israeli officials have not confirmed the deaths, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been threatening to kill Arouri even before the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7 that started the war.
The reported death "should only be the beginning of a series" in which Israel hunts down "everyone that was involved directly or indirectly in the heinous attacks of Oct. 7," Bennett told Newsmax.
The former prime minister Tuesday also discussed reports Iran has grown its enrichment of uranium to up to 60% purity, near the level used for nuclear weapons, and warned the United States it must take steps to keep Iran from reaching that point.
"If America does not stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, there's a high chance that America will meet that nuclear weapon on a nuclear 9-11," Bennett warned. "It could be in New York and Washington or anywhere in America or anywhere in the West, for that matter."
Iran is the leading exporter of terrorism in the world, he added, and if it acquires a nuclear weapon, "that's an unmitigated disaster."
"They've proven that they're willing to kill innocent people anywhere, and we just have to stop them," Bennett said. "America plays a huge role here and yes, I do think that America needs to place a credible military threat, otherwise Iran just won't stop."
Bennett further Tuesday discussed an opinion piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, in which he called on the United States and Israel to act together to bring down Iran's "evil empire."
He told Newsmax that could not be accomplished with war as much with ongoing pressure and economic diplomatic actions, in the "precise same way that America brought down the Soviet Union in the late 80s."
"We have a cold war going on between Iran and the West," he said. "Iran is a rotten terror radical regime, but it's also highly incompetent, and I believe that with ongoing pressure at economic, diplomatic, overt and covert actions Iran's regime can be replaced with a competent, good regime."
Bennett pointed out late President Ronald Reagan never directly attacked the Soviet Union, but "it fell in 1989."
"The same can be done in Iran and we need to do it, because Iran is responsible for all the chaos that we're seeing across the Middle East and in the world, or much of it," Bennett concluded. "These ayatollahs are sitting back … enjoying life, wreaking havoc across the entire world, and they are not paying a price.
"I think that it's time that they do."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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