Ed Royce: “I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, as this resolution notes, Israel faces a growing number of…”

“I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, as this resolution notes, Israel faces a growing number of threats, and I think I would just speak for a moment about the nature of those threats. I appreciate Representative Ileana Ros- Lehtinen bringing this resolution before us. Representative Eliot Engel and I had a rather unique opportunity of seeing how these threats keep evolving. We were near the border in Israel and had an invitation on the Gaza border to go into one of these tunnels that had been discovered. Imagine the shock when we found out the intentions of why this tunnel was dug. It ended up coming up underneath an elementary school. Now, imagine for a minute the situation Israel is in when you have an adversary, Hamas in this case, who wishes to tunnel underneath an elementary school in order to capture children, take them back into Gaza, and force the IDF, as you and I knew they would do, to fight block by block by block to try to free those children. That was the strategy. Now, luckily the tunnels were discovered before they could carry this out. I was in Israel also in 2006, back during the second Lebanon war. The Hezbollah rockets came down across northern Israel every day. And in Haifa, every day there were victims that were brought into that trauma hospital. Back then, Hezbollah had a collection of about 10,000 rockets and missiles. That is what they had left in the inventory. They had shot off about half of their inventory.…”