At Belmont Hill, Milley voices support for Israel, attacks Hamas
‘It is a tough time, a time of testing, a time of testing our national character.’
GENERAL MARK MILLEY, at a centennial celebration for Belmont Hill School
Retired Army General Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a Winchester native, offered a full-throated support of Israel during remarks at the centennial celebration of Belmont Hill School on Friday, about a week after the slaughter of Israeli civilians in a surprise attack by Hamas.
Milley, a 1976 graduate of Belmont Hill who in September completed a four-year term as the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, mourned the victims of the brutal assault and denounced Hamas as “a terrorist organization dedicated to the senseless murder of the Jewish people.”
“There’s elderly that were burned alive; there are young people that were slaughtered and murdered at a concert; there’s Holocaust survivors that were taken away, captured,” he said.
“It’s been the bloodiest week and bloodiest day in Judaism since the Holocaust,” he said. “This is no time for moral equivalency. Hamas is not a resistance organization defending some cause of liberty and freedom . ... Their charter calls for the slaughter of all Jews. And in 1945, we, the world, said ‘never again,’ and we must say ‘never again’ today. We must stand with Israel, as President Biden, Secretary Austin, Secretary Blinken has said. We, the United States of America, we stand for something, and today we stand for Israel.”
Milley’s remarks were met with applause from the audience gathered to celebrate the school’s anniversary.
“It is a tough time, a time of testing, a time of testing our national character,” he said, concluding his comments on the war before moving on to reflections on his time as a student at Belmont Hill.
Since the Oct. 7 attack, Israeli forces have engaged in an around-the-clock bombardment of Gaza and have warned Palestinian civilians to flee to the southern region of the territory ahead of an expected ground assault. On Friday, the Israeli military said its troops conducted temporary raids of Gaza to battle militants and search for some 150 hostages, including men, women, and children abducted by Hamas in the assault.
Palestinian civilians, whom Hamas has urged to remain in their homes, continued to try to escape the violence on Saturday but have struggled amid a shortage of water and medical supplies. International aid groups and the United Nations have warned that the evacuation could cause an already dire humanitarian crisis to further spiral.
Hamas’s attack last weekend killed more than 1,300 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, and about 1,500 Hamas militants died in the ensuing fighting, according to the Israeli government. Israel was still working Saturday to fully assess the number of casualties and identify all of the victims.
The Gaza Health Ministry said Saturday that more than 2,200 people have been killed in the territory in the past week, including 724 children and 458 women.