Ralph Reed, Founder and chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, spoke to Arutz Sheva - Israel National News from Kfar Aza, one of the communities whose residents were massacred and kidnapped on October 7 by Hamas terrorists. Reed's visit to Israel was initiated and sponsored by Dr. Joseph Frager & Rabbi David Katz, leaders of the Israel Heritage Foundation.
"I came to Kfar Aza, received an IDF tour and briefing. We went into some of the homes and saw the damage and walked into the very rooms where innocent Israeli men, women, and children were brutally murdered, raped, their bodies burned, in some cases dismembered. It's very sobering. I wish that every American could walk these streets and go into these rooms and see the horror that I saw," Reed said.
"It's a reminder that even though we say 'Never Again,' that antisemitism and hatred of Jews and hatred of Israel, that evil, one of the most insidious forms of evil that has ever existed, is alive and well in the world today and it must be resisted and it must be defeated," he said.
Reed said that seeing the horrors up close and in person is different even when knowing the the details of what happened beforehand. "Honestly, it's very hard to describe. We went into actual homes and walked into saferooms where people were brutally murdered and gunned down. A young couple - we went into their saferoom. They were about to be engaged and they died together in that saferoom. [We] saw another saferoom where the parents were killed while two children were hiding in a closet. It's just a reminder of the evil of this Iranian-financed, trained, sponsored, and equipped terrorism. And I don't believe Israel will be safe until these terrorists are defeated."
Addressing the recent pressure from the Biden Administration to restrain Israel from continuing to go after Hamas, he said, "As an American, I found that very concerning. Joe Biden took the extraordinary step of flying to Israel and standing on a tarmac, embracing the Prime Minister and saying, 'We have your back.' In my view, that means until the job is finished, until Hamas is defeated, its infrastructure and its tunnels are dismantled, whatever it means to destroy Hamas so that something like this can never happen again."
"Speaking for myself, even though I believe the Administration may be having second thoughts about full support for Israel in this struggle, I don't believe the American people are. Congress, as I speak, is passing an aid package to Israel with no conditions attached to provide it with the weapons and the financing that it needs to finish this fight. And I can tell you tat the faith community in the United States, especially the 60-80 million evangelical Christians stand with Israel," he said.