Ministers call to slam Hamas harder

Two of the eight ministers in the key security cabinet, Gilad Erdan and Avigdor Liberman, spoke to the media at the cabinet meeting today about the need to deal Hamas a severe blow in order to eliminate rocket and tunnel threats.

A third minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, said he doubted any truce would hold and that Israel would likely have to mount a wider ground offensive. But Channel 2 says Netanyahu is resisting that pressure.

Gilad Erdan said the government is “getting close to the point where we’ll have to take a decision.” It seemed very likely that Israel would have to “retake” Gaza, “with all that this entails,” since the rocket fire was not stopping, he added.

As for Liberman, he stated that “from the start [I said] that we had to defeat Hamas decisively. Hamas’s minimum demands were more than the maximum Israel would accept. If we’d followed my advice from Day One… we’d be past that stage. We have to defeat Hamas and clean the territory [of Hamas].”

Amos Yadlin, the former IDF Military Intelligence chief, says — as he has been saying for the past few weeks — that Israel “did not hit Hamas hard enough” in the military offensive. “Hamas has to be weakened” to the point where Mahmoud Abbas can reassert control in Gaza.