Former prime minister Ehud Olmert advocates an immediate cessation of hostilities in the Gaza Strip and a move toward a preliminary agreement on the basis of a two-state solution.
In an interview on CNN, Olmert was asked whether the war should be ended, to which he replied: "I thought, eight months ago, not a week ago, not two weeks ago, eight months ago I thought that it should have stopped. We have reached the point where we achieved most of what we had to achieve, which is to destroy the military capacity of Hamas."
Olmert justified the immediate military response to the October 7th attack, noting that because of the continuation of the war, Israeli soldiers and innocent Palestinian civilians were now being killed.
"Hamas is a terrorist, murderous organization. There is no question about it. They did something absolutely terrible. And there was -- it was an inevitable reaction that Israel had to make. But we achieved most of what we can achieve in the military operation. We destroyed the Hamas, we destroyed the tunnels, not 100 percent of them, but enough. We destroyed their weapons, their rockets, their bunkers, their command positions, everything."
"Now, what happens is that we lose Israeli soldiers, we lose innocent Palestinians living in Gaza embedded with Hamas and, of course, it is a main reason for the growing number of innocent civilians being killed, but we are not going to get back the hostages if we do not stop the war."
Olmert believes that the only way to bring back the Israeli hostages is by an immediate cessation of hostilities in a process that will lead to a full withdrawal of the IDF from the Gaza Strip.
According to him, "And the time is to stop it today, right now, and to make an agreement that will bring back the hostages There will be Palestinian prisoners released, no doubt. And then, we will have to pull out from Gaza altogether. And there will be a military force and an administration force. Two different things. They will take over Gaza and they will provide for the security that there will not be any further military terrorist attacks from Gaza to the State of Israel."
The Gaza arrangement, according to Olmert, is a stage towards the substantive discussion of a comprehensive settlement of the Palestinian problem. "What are we going to do with 6 million Palestinians? We have to find a solution. Now, there is not any solution other than a two-state solution. And that's what we, based on what I have proposed to Abu Mazen in 2008 when I was prime minister, that's what we have to do now. We have to try and bring it back to the center stage, to the international discourse, to the ministries, prime ministers, governments everywhere to bring it back and deal with it."