Israel’s response ‘justified and proportionate,’ Netanyahu says

Netanyahu repeats that “every civilian casualty is a tragedy — a tragedy of Hamas’s making.”

He quotes Elie Wiesel saying, “Hamas is engaging in child sacrifice.”

“For the sake of all our children, it must not be allowed to get away with it.”

The prime minister now takes some questions in English.

Asked how Israel would have tackled the tunnels had Hamas accepted Egypt’s ceasefire proposal three weeks ago, he says that Israel took preemptive action on one tunnel, prior to the first Egypt ceasefire proposal.

“We began dealing with first tunnel before the Egyptian offer. We had info on a pending attack, took action before,” he says.

Israel would have preferred to solve the tunnel threat by non-military means, and would have sought to to do so under the terms of the Egyptian proposal, he says.

Asked about the scale and scope of Israel’s military response to Hamas, he says it has been “justified and proportionate,” and stresses again that this does not lessen Israel’s regret for civilian casualties.

It would have been “disproportionate” not to act, he says, and therefore “to get our people killed.”

With regard to PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s role in the truce, he says: “We have cooperated and are cooperating with the PA. We’re prepared to see a role for them [in] the reconstruction Gaza, humanitarian aid, security questions. The ceasefire agreement was coordinated with them.”

— Raphael Ahren