‘Hamas won’t dare fire on us for years’ after this op, deputy minister says

Deputy Defense Minister Tzachi Hanegbi tells Channel 2 that, “When this is over… Hamas won’t dare fire on us for years.”

He says Israel isn’t entering ceasefire talks in Cairo because Hamas is there to raise its demands, not to agree on its own disarmament.

Abbas “is irrelevant to a solution in Gaza,” he adds, though he concedes that Egypt may want Abbas’s forces deployed on its border “and that’s up to the Egyptians; we don’t have a problem with that.”

According to the IDF, Palestinian terror groups have fired 39 rockets at Israel today (fewer than the more than 60 reported by Channel 2), three of which were intercepted.

Since the start of Operation Protective Edge, the IDF says 3,055 rockets have been fired at Israel, 552 of which were intercepted by Iron Dome. The army estimated that Hamas started the war with a stockpile of roughly 9,000 rockets.