There is a fundamental situation in which the country has reached rock bottom, that a mother can't send her children out of the house in the morning. The country has reached rock bottom and this needs to be changed.

I don't know of any army that does more than an Israeli army does to avoid civilian casualties. But incidental and unintended casualties accompany every war.

Our friendship will weather the current disagreement as well, to grow even stronger in the future.

Israel is doing what any other country would do, and certainly the U.S. would do. If 80 percent of your population were under fire and you had 60 seconds or 90 seconds to get into bomb shelters, if terror tunnels were dug underneath your border in order to come in and explode your kindergartens and massacre your people and kidnap American citizens.

I think it's my responsibility, to speak up when something threatens our very future.

I would say we want to stop the firing of rockets, for sure. But we also want to dismantle the terror - the tunnel - the terror tunnel networks that we have uncovered.

Intelligence is a critical thing.