Obama Calls for Better Cooperation with Israel to Confront Hizbullah
U.S. President Barack Obama has stressed the importance of better intelligence cooperation between Washington and Tel Aviv to stop Hizbullah from obtaining more missiles with which to target Israel.
“As much intelligence cooperation and sharing as we’re already doing, we need to do better if we want to stop Hizbullah from continuing to get missiles that can be trained on Tel Aviv,” Obama told The Forward, a newspaper published in New York for a Jewish-American audience, in an interview.
He said Washington should discuss more with Israel on whether “there (are) additional capabilities that Israel may be able to use to prevent Hizbullah, for example, from getting missiles.”
He said Iran has been effective in its destabilizing activities because it has used proxies.
Tehran has “invested in places like Lebanon for decades and become entrenched. And the reason we haven’t done a better job of stopping that is not because they’re outspending us. The reason is because we haven’t been as coordinated, had as good intelligence and been as systematic in pushing back as we need to be,” Obama told The Forward.
The U.S. president reiterated that his disagreement with Israel over the terms of the Iran nuclear deal was a "fight within the family."
"Over the next several weeks as we get to the conclusion of the congressional debate, I think it is important for everybody to just take a breath for a moment and recognize that people on both sides of the debate love the United States and also love Israel," he said.
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