Gallant: This was worst terror attack world has ever seen; we will wipe out Hamas

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calls the Hamas onslaught “the worst terror attack the world has ever seen.”

“Thousands of terrorists stormed in to destroy, murder, loot and slaughter.”

As a lifelong soldier who witnessed many awful things, he says, “I never saw anything like this.”

He cites “children bound together and murdered, people burned, barbaric deeds that the Jewish people has not suffered since 1945.”

And these acts were only halted by the “heroism of the fighters.”

He recounts various stories of officers and soldiers doing everything they could to try and stop the attackers, some dying in the fight, and others continuing to battle. He says they freed some of those who had been captured. He speaks of a female soldier in Ofakim with no ammunition who crawled over to a dead terrorist, grabbed his hand grenade and threw it into a room to kill a second terrorist. A single general killed 14 terrorists, he recounts. “These are the heroes who stopped the murders… We’ve cleaned the area and we’re on the attack.”

Speaking with an angry intensity in a televised statement alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and National Unity leader Benny Gantz, he says the Hamas terror group will be “obliterated.”

“Hamas — the Islamic State of Gaza — will be wiped from the face of the earth,” he says. “It will not continue to exist.

“There will be no situation in which Israeli children are murdered and we all go about our business,” he adds.