Tel Aviv:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated Wednesday the bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip aims to deter Hamas but did not rule out a campaign to “conquer” the enclave’s Islamist rulers.
“There are only two ways that you can deal with them,” he stated about Hamas in a Tel Aviv briefing for a group of foreign ambassadors.
“You can either conquer them, and that’s always an open possibility, or you can deter them, and we are engaged right now in forceful deterrence, but I have to say we don’t rule out anything.”
The hawkish premier insisted Israel “didn’t seek” the escalation that started on May 10 when Hamas fired rockets towards Jerusalem immediately after demanding that Israeli safety personnel vacate the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam’s third holiest website.
Netanyahu linked the dramatic surge in violence to a choice by Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas to cancel Palestinian elections that had been scheduled for this weekend.
Abbas’s secular Fatah movement had reached a deal with its extended-term rivals Hamas to hold the vote, but Abbas cancelled it citing Israel’s refusal to assure voting in annexed east Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim as their future capital.
Hamas accused Abbas of perpetrating a “coup” against the agreement, and of providing Israel a veto more than the Palestinian appropriate to vote.
Palestinian authorities have stated Hamas is now in search of to establish itself as the actual defenders of Palestinians against Israel, and as a more forceful voice than Abbas’s Fatah.
Netanyahu stated that when Hamas “saw that these elections were not going to take place, they sought to… incite riots, to incite violence, in order to further their political goals”.
He implied Hamas was also accountable for an escalation of unrest in east Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah location, exactly where a Jewish settler work to evict Palestinians from their houses has fuelled months of anger.
And he blamed the Islamists for the clashes at Al-Aqsa, which was stormed by Israeli safety forces in response to Palestinian stone-throwing through the holy month of Ramadan.
“I have to say that we didn’t expect quite a conflagration,” Netanyahu stated.
“What we did was everything in our power to deescalate the potential conflict around Jerusalem and the Temple Mount,” he added, making use of the Jewish term for the Al-Aqsa compound, which is also a sacred website for Jews.
The aim of the Gaza campaign is to “degrade Hamas’ capabilities, their terror capabilities, and degrade their will,” Netanyahu stated.
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