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Rice: No Choice But to Isolate Hamas

[State Department] Secretary of State Rice said Monday: "I was just asked by an Arab TV station: 'well, do you think it's right that the world tries to isolate Hamas?' Well, Hamas has isolated itself. When you say, if you're Hamas, that you're not prepared to renounce violence, when you say that you're not prepared to live up to the agreements that Palestinian leaders have signed, what is there left to do except to isolate Hamas?" "There is nothing in the NIE that suggests Iran is not dangerous. The NIE talks about one of the three elements of a nuclear program, which is weaponization. Enrichment and reprocessing, which can lead to fissile materials, continues. The effort to get ever longer ranges of ballistic missiles continues. And what even the halt to weaponization says to me is that this is a state that after denying for years that it had a covert military program - in fact, our intelligence says had a covert military program. Now, did they halt it? Perhaps." "We think that Egypt has to do more. Those tunnels need to be dealt with...the will to do it is very important here....Look, the Egyptians don't have any national interest in having Hamas strengthened next to them."
2008-01-09 01:00:00
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