2023-12-01 09:15:00
Israel is back in action to ‘destroy’ Hamas, says IDF spokesperson
After the week-long truce between Israel and Hamas expired, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are once again acting to “destroy” the extremist group, according to a spokesman.
The Israeli military’s goal is to destroy the group “so that it can never commit this crime in Israel again and, along the way, bring our people home,” IDF spokesman Maj. Doron Spielman told CNN on Friday, while Israeli forces resumed combat missions against Hamas in Gaza.
Spielman said the military’s targets remain “Hamas strongholds, Hamas terrorists and where they fired the rocket launchers.”
Sirens sounded in Israel an hour before the truce expired on Friday morning, warning of the arrival of a rocket that was intercepted. Sirens have continued to sound in Israeli communities around Gaza ever since.
“Sleeping Israelis woke up again to the sound of the red siren of Hamas rockets raining down on us once again from Gaza,” Spielman told CNN, adding that “there have been multiple rockets” that were intercepted on Friday.
Whether the truce can resume is up to politicians, not the military, Spielman said.
“The political echelon can decide to take this in the direction they want, it is always an option for them. As soldiers, they have given us the order that the truce has been violated,” he stated.
Asked about IDF attacks on civilian areas of Gaza, Spielman said: “We don’t want to see Gazan civilians die, but Hamas is operating directly from those areas, and we have to ask ourselves what the alternative is.”
“If we do nothing, if we give up, we are only going to allow Hamas to carry out another massacre like the one on October 7. I think that morally that is completely inconceivable,” he said.
Spielman also argued that Hamas was not targeting troops, “it was directly targeting civilians.”
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