Hamas leader threatens next Gaza war will be the last

Senior Hamas leader in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh warned Saturday the next war between Israel and the terror group would be the last, as tensions on Israel’s southern border spiraled over the weekend.

Speaking before nighttime prayer in a mosque in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, the former Gaza prime minister said Hamas was not afraid of Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman.

“The young men of Gaza have smashed bigger [men] than Liberman, [like former prime minister Ariel] Sharon and his associates,” Haniyeh said, according to the Palestinian news site Paltoday.

“The next war will resolve the conflict with the Israeli enemy,” he added.

Haniyeh’s office, however, denied on Sunday that the Hamas leader had made any “media statement” or gave an interview to any journalist about the next war.

Israel has fought three major conflicts with Hamas since the terror group violently took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007.

The comments were in response to recent remarks made by a top Israeli defense official — believed to be Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman — that the next “confrontation must be the last in terms of Hamas’s regime.”

Haniyeh said in early May that his group was not seeking war with Israel, but would not tolerate Israeli incursions into the Strip.

On Saturday, the Israeli Air Force attacked targets belonging to terror groups in the Gaza Strip, hours after a rocket fired from the coastal enclave hit a preschool in the border town of Sderot, causing damage but no injuries.

No group in Gaza claimed responsibility for the rocket fire on Sderot, which came hours after Israel announced a lockdown on the West Bank city of Hebron — the area of two deadly attacks on Israelis since Thursday — and cuts in monthly tax payments to the Palestinian Authority due to the money it gives to the families of terrorists.