Former U.S. ambassador and former Republican contender for the presidency Nikki Haley toured southern Israel on Monday, laying some of the blame on Iran and Russia for the Oct. 7 massacre of Israeli citizens by the terrorist group Hamas.
Haley was accompanied by Israel’s former permanent representative to the U.N. Danny Danon, now a member of the Israeli Knesset, as she looked on at communities still feeling the effects of the Hamas attacks that left more than 1,200 Jews dead.
Watch: Former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley visited the Re’im Forest in southern Israel where Hamas terrorists massacred partygoers at the Nova Festival on October 7th. During her visit, Haley heard first-hand accounts from survivors of the massacre.
🎥Yoav Dudkevitch/TPS pic.twitter.com/pdyFReuEfe— Israel National News – Arutz Sheva (@ArutzSheva_En) May 27, 2024
According to The Times of Israel, Haley addressed the local media and stated in no uncertain terms she did not feel Hamas is the only culprit.
Together with Ambassador @NikkiHaley, we toured Israel’s South today.
We visited Kibbutz Nir Oz, the site of the ‘Nova’ festival, and Sderot, and spoke with survivors of the October 7th massacre.
During the tour, Ambassador Haley said: “Don’t listen to what is being said in the… pic.twitter.com/p2CEhzrVjY— Danny Danon 🇮🇱 דני דנון (@dannydanon) May 27, 2024
“[If] you think this will only be in Israel, if we are arrogant enough this could absolutely happen in America too,” Haley said.
She said the unprecedented violence against the Jewish state was “orchestrated by Iran.”
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She added, “It was helped with Russian intelligence. And it was fueled by money from China. Don’t deny that.”
It was not clear what Haley was referring to when she said China funded the Hamas attacks.
In 2021, The New York Times reported that Beijing had inked a 25-year deal and agreed to invest $400 billion into Iran’s economy in exchange for discounted oil.
In partially blaming China for the carnage of last fall, Haley struck out at the Chinese Communist Party.
“China’s been funding Iran the entire time,” she said before she lit into Moscow.
“Russia’s intelligence helped them know where everything was,” she said of the Hamas militants who murdered, raped and kidnapped Israelis in the early morning assault.
“Iran helped get them trained,” she said. “So this isn’t Hamas. These are all murderers and accomplices. If we really mean it’s never going to happen again, we have to be honest and truthful with ourselves who did this.”
In October, in the hours after the Hamas attacks, intelligence officials in the U.S. and abroad told The Washington Post that many of the Hamas fighters who had engaged in the attack on innocent Jews were trained and funded by the Iranian government.
Some of them entered southern Israel from Gaza by paraglider.
Those officials concluded Hamas would not have been capable of launching such a complex offensive without the help of Iran.
“The amount of training, logistics, communication, personnel, and weapons required provides a massive footprint,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA senior operations officer, told the Post.
“This suggests both Iranian involvement, given the complexity of the attack, and highlights the colossal intelligence failure.”
