This Christmas will be the first in years without violence in Israel, thanks to President Donald Trump’s “truly historic” efforts to restore peace to the region. On the latest episode of “This Week on Capitol Hill,” U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee praised the president’s leadership in securing peace and pressuring Hamas to disarm.

“We have a ceasefire in Israel that has lasted just a little over a couple of months now. President Trump’s incredible leadership to get all the Arab nations to Sharm el-Sheikh to sign the agreement that says Hamas has to go and the hostages have to come home — truly historic,” Huckabee said, celebrating the birth of Christ in Israel. “It’s been a remarkable couple of months. No rockets, no missiles, many Israelis, for the first time in quite a while, are experiencing peaceful evenings of sleep. And it’s something that they haven’t had in a long, long time,” he continued. “I don’t think most Americans can understand what that’s like. It’s like having several tornado sirens go off night after night after night, and it has a cumulative effect, but there is a great relief and a great appreciation for President Trump in the U.S.”

The peace in Israel has lasted for roughly two months, and Hamas will now have to begin disarming, according to the terms of the peace deal brokered by Trump. Huckabee anticipated that Hamas will begin the disarming process “because President Trump promised they would, and he’s pretty good at keeping his promises.”

Referring to Operation Midnight Hammer earlier this year, the ambassador continued, “I’m confident that if they think that they can wait him out, they’re probably making as big a mistake as Iran did when Iran thought that he wasn’t serious, when he told them they couldn’t have a nuclear weapon and that they weren’t going to enrich uranium. He answered them with a B-2 bomber on a Saturday night.” Huckabee quipped, “I hope it got their attention. If it didn’t, he knows how to do it again.”

“Hamas has to understand they have no future there,” Huckabee stressed. “The disarming of Hamas is the single most difficult part of the peace agreement, the most difficult part to implement, but I’m optimistic that we’re going to get there because even all the Arab nations signed on to a commitment that Hamas would be disarmed and they would be expelled and moved out of Gaza as they should be,” he continued.

The ambassador noted that Hamas has largely been confined to “the red zone,” the western front of Gaza facing the Mediterranean Sea, while the eastern portion of Gaza, the “green zone,” has been largely demilitarized and is currently held by Israel. “The Israelis have control of it now. They don’t want to stay there. I hope people don’t think the Israelis want to permanently own Gaza. They don’t. They would love just to get away from it, let others govern it, take care of it, rebuild it, and let them go back to tending the land that is theirs,” the ambassador explained. “But it is going to take some combinations of deprivation of resources getting to Hamas that’s underway. And then at some point, it probably will require kinetic action on the part of a police or military force that basically says to Hamas, ‘If you don’t lay down your weapons, we’ll lay them down for you.’ As President Trump said to them, ‘We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.’”

The ceasefire in Israel is still fragile though. As The Washington Stand reported late last month, Hamas militants fired upon Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the “red zone,” prompting the IDF to retaliate with a series of airstrikes. According to Israeli military officials, Hamas has violated the ceasefire agreement on “hundreds” of occasions, giving rise to concerns that the Palestine-based terrorist group may not be disarming but instead re-arming and preparing for further violence.

Appearing on Monday night’s episode of “Washington Watch,” Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) warned that Iran may still pose a threat to Israel, despite the success of Operation Midnight Hammer in crippling the nation’s nuclear facilities. “I think it’s really important that Israel continues to get our full support. We need to stop Hamas, stop the Iranian terrorist regime,” Tenney said. “By the way, look what they do to their own people. I mean, they clamp down on freedom, [and] the people live in poverty. You know, Iran in the 70s, before the Ayatollah took over, was a very sophisticated, well-educated population, and many of those people, especially those who stand up to the regime, are either murdered or maimed,” she continued. Tenney recounted that political dissidents are often tortured, and some even have their eyes cut out. “It couldn’t be more cruel.”

The New York congresswoman also suggested that Iran poses a threat to the U.S. “They actually have two missions. The ‘little Satan’ is to eliminate Israel. The ‘big Satan’ is to eliminate the United States,” Tenney explained of Iran and its Islamist agenda. “So they’re on that mission. … President Trump is correct to give Israel the power and the strength and the support that it needs to defend Israel and to defend Western civilization, which is really what Israel is doing and really what we’re all supporting.”