Los Angeles Times · Los Angeles, CA · 16 July 2018

CP-2018-038

Israel contemplates Gaza strategy

After heavy fighting, military opts to target Hamas rather than those who launch incendiary attacks.

BY NOGA TARNOPOLSKY AND HANA SALAH

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM — The worst of the fighting between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip has subsided a day after the violence threatened to escalate into war. But Israeli Cabinet officials and top military officials appeared deeply divided over how to respond to continuing low-tech attacks from across the border.

The militants fired nearly 200 mortar rounds, rockets and missiles at Israeli communities Saturday as Israeli fighter jets bombed military installations throughout Gaza in the biggest eruption of violence along the border since 2014. [...] Hadashot news and other major Israeli media reported an extraordinary exchange that they said occurred late Saturday at a meeting of Israel's security Cabinet.

"Why not shoot at anyone firing aerial weapons against our communities and our troops?" the education minister, Naftali Bennett, proposed to the army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot. "They are terrorists in every sense," Bennett said.

Eizenkot responded, "I don't think shooting at youths and children who are those sometimes launching the kites and balloons is the right thing to do. Are you proposing we drop a bomb from a plane on a cell of kite and balloon launchers?" Bennett answered in the affirmative. "I oppose that operationally and morally," Eizenkot said. In a briefing to soldiers, Maj. Gen.

Herzl Halevi, the commander of Israel's Southern Command, said that instead of targeting individual kite launchers, Israel would target Hamas.

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping.

Context added by this archive

Photo caption: "A BOY mourns his brother, Ameer Namara, 15, who was killed Saturday in an Israeli strike in Gaza City." Credit: HAITHAM IMAD EPA/Shutterstock. The story closes "Special correspondents Tarnopolsky and Salah reported from Jerusalem and Gaza City, respectively" — one of the few in this batch with a correspondent inside Gaza.

Also quoted: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ("We hit Hamas in a significant way and hard... Our policy is clear: Whoever hurts us, we will hit them with great strength."), Hamas police spokesman Col. Ayman Batniji, Hamas political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh, and UN special coordinator Nickolay Mladenov ("Yesterday we were on the verge of a real war...

This confrontation is not wanted by anyone and no one wants it, and everyone will lose in it.").

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