Hamas: Huckabee’s remarks expose ‘American bias towards Zionist domination, annexation’

Gaza’s Hamas resistance movement has condemned recent comments by the US ambassador to the occupied territories, saying they reflected a colonialist mindset and demonstrated Washington’s alignment with “Zionist domination and annexation” projects.

In a statement on Saturday, Hamas said the remarks by Mike Huckabee constituted “a clear embodiment of the colonialist mentality upon which the Zionist movement was founded.”

The comments, it noted, “reveal the extent of the blatant American bias towards the projects of domination and annexation, in a flagrant violation of international law and the UN Charter, and contempt for the sovereignty of the region's countries and the rights of their peoples.”

Huckabee: ‘It would be fine if they took it all’

The reaction followed an interview aired on Friday in which Huckabee addressed the idea of the Israeli regime’s expanding across West Asia under the so-called “Greater Israel vision.”

“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee said during the interview with journalist Tucker Carlson, when asked about the regime’s oft-repeated ambition to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates.

Huckabee referenced, what he called, the biblical “promised land” in trying to justify the regime’s expansionist ambitions. Carlson, however, described such contours as belonging to the descendants of the Prophet Abraham, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

When asked whether he approved of Tel Aviv’s takeover of the entire West Asia region, Huckabee replied, “They don’t want to take it over. They’re not asking to take it over,” adding, “If they end up getting attacked by all these places, and they win that war, and they take that land, OK, that’s a whole other discussion.”

The so-called “Greater Israel” concept envisions borders stretching from the Euphrates River in Iraq to the Nile River in Egypt, encompassing present-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, as well as parts of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly promoted such expansionist ideas. In a 2025 television interview, Netanyahu said he subscribed to the vision, describing it as a “historic and spiritual mission” and affirming his attachment to the vision of the so-called “Promised Land.”

Far-right Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has also sparked controversy over such comments. In 2023, he spoke at an event featuring a map that included the Palestinian territories and portions of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan as part of the occupied territories.

This week, Smotrich said they would try to “encourage” the exit of Palestinians from the land and demanded a formal end to the Oslo Accords, signed in the 1990s between the regime and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a means of “resolving the conflict and guaranteeing Palestinians’ right to self-determination.”

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