Israeli official calls for eliminating terrorists sending arson balloons from Gaza

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Israel should not have acted with restraint in the face of hundreds of kites and balloons carrying incendiary materials launched from Gaza, Education Minister Naftali Bennett said Monday.

Bennett, the leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party, said Israel’s reluctance to go after those launching the kites, many of whom are children, allowed the problem to grow unacceptably large.

“If we had struck the first kite launchers when there were still one or two of them, it would not have reached thousands,” he said in an interview with the public broadcaster Kan translated by The Jerusalem Post. “They are terrorists in the full meaning of the word and we must eliminate them.”

Hundreds of acres of farmland and forests have been burned in the western Negev over the past few months. “If we follow the formula of ‘quiet in return for quiet’ we will end up with a stronger Hamas, and we will have a second Hezbollah in Gaza,” Bennett said. “We have no interest in hurting the residents of Gaza. But we have a clear goal.

Just like we had the strategic threat of tunnels and ignored it for years, until Operation Protective Edge, we have to do the same with a militarized Gaza. It is inconceivable that Hamas will fire on us when they wish and we will remain silent.” Hamas has paused its rocket fire in recent days and said it would cease targeting Israel if the Israelis reciprocate “calm for calm.”

However, Energy and Water Minister Yuval Steinitz told Kan that Israel had “not signed a cease-fire agreement.” “Ousting Hamas is an option we are closer to now than any time in the past,” Steinitz said.

Also Monday, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman claimed that all of the Palestinians killed in Gaza since the end of March are members of Hamas, saying that “since the start of the March of Return events, Hamas has sustained 168 deaths, 4,348 injured and dozens of terror facilities destroyed,” The Times of Israel reported.

The Israel Defense Forces has said that while it believes the majority of those who died were members of Hamas, its troops have also accidentally killed civilians. A pregnant woman and a toddler were reported to have been killed last week during Israeli strikes against a Hamas target next to their home.

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. Filed under the archive’s spelling; the page prints “St Louis Jewish Light”.

Context added by this archive

The single most important clipping in the batch for Maria’s Liberman question: an American Jewish community paper printing Liberman’s claim that every one of the Palestinians killed since March was Hamas, with his own casualty arithmetic, and then printing the Israeli army’s own partial retraction of it in the next paragraph, ending on a pregnant woman and a toddler killed ‘last week’ — both unnamed.

Nobody in Gaza is quoted; Hamas’s position reaches the reader through the phrase ‘calm for calm’ only.

Cite this clipping

"Israeli official calls for eliminating terrorists sending arson balloons from Gaza," St. Louis Jewish Light, 15 August 2018. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2018-042. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2018-042