Israel to continue bombing Gaza ‘even at the expense of harming its detained citizens’: Report

Israel has decided to continue its large scale and continuous bombardment of Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, “even at the expense of harming” Israeli citizens held as prisoners of war by Hamas, the Israeli Army Radio reported yesterday evening.

The broadcaster quoted an unnamed senior official as saying that Tel Aviv has decided to continue carrying out attacks on Gaza “forcefully and on a large scale, even at the expense of harming the Israeli prisoners being held in Gaza.”

“We have indications that Iran has pushed Hamas to take action and is pushing Hezbollah to prepare for battle,” the official said, adding that “if there is accurate intelligence information about the location of the [Israeli] prisoners, of course Israel will refrain from attacking this site, but as long as there is no such information, all Hamas targets will be attacked.”

According to the report, Israel “does not specify how long the war will last,” but a high-ranking political official said it “will last many days, perhaps many weeks, and even longer.”

For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the goal of the war at this stage is to deprive Hamas of the capabilities that would enable it to harm Israel.

An Israeli official described by the report as high-level also said, “this is a very broad definition, and our interpretation is not limited. We do not want to be more specific than that, but there will be no Hamastan.”

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