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August 24, 2014 9:22 am
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Netanyahu: Gaza Operation Will Likely Continue Into New School Year

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avatar by Dave Bender

The scene of a Gaza rocket attack on Israel that left a 4-year-old boy dead. Photo: Israel police.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s said on Sunday that Operation Protective Edge will likely continue after the school year starts on September 1, according to a statement released by his bureau.

Netanyahu, after sending condolences to the family of four-and-a-half-year-old Daniel Tragerman of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, who was killed in a mortar shelling on Friday, said he appreciated the “resilience,” of Israelis in Gaza-area communities in coping with continuing rocket barrages.

“I appreciate your suffering and I share your pain,” the PM said. “We will do our utmost to help you through these difficult days. At the next Cabinet meeting, we will approve an extraordinary package of assistance for your communities. We are with you and we will stay with you until quiet is achieved, and afterwards as well.”

4-year-old Daniel Tragerman, of Kibbutz Sdot Negev, killed by a Hamas mortar shell Photo: family

Netanyahu said that “Hamas is paying and will yet pay a heavy price for the crimes that it has perpetrated,” and called on the “residents of Gaza to immediately evacuate any building from which Hamas is carrying out terrorist activity. Any such place is a target for us. In recent days we have proven there is no immunity for those who fire at Israel’s citizens. This is true in all sectors and regarding all borders. We are determined to complete the mission. We are patient.”

Emphasizing that Operation Protective Edge would continue until “its goals are achieved,” Netanyahu reiterated a statement he made “on the first day of the operation that it could take time and we are prepared that this campaign might continue even after the start of the school year.”

We embarked on Operation Protective Edge in order to restore quiet and security to you and to all Israeli citizens,” he said to Gaza-area residents.

We will not complete the mission, we will not complete the operation, until this goal is achieved. The more determined and patient we are, the more our enemies will understand that they will not succeed in wearing us down. Against their attrition, they will be struck very hard. I think that anyone who looks back over recent days will see the significance of this. The IDF is continuing to strike very hard at Hamas and the other terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip and will continue to do so until the goal is achieved. In this struggle we are on a broad front,” Netanyahu assessed.

Contending that “many states in the region and in the West are beginning to understand that this is a single front, that Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas,” Netanyahu said “They act in the same way. They are branches of the same poisonous tree. They are two extremist Islamic terrorist movements that abduct and murder innocents, that execute their own people, that shrink at nothing including the willful murder of children. In recent days we heard from Hamas spokesmen that they admit to what we have been saying all along, that they murdered Eyal, Gilad and Naftali.”

“Both movements are, in effect, making an effort to establish Islamic rule, caliphates, without human rights, across wide areas, by slaughtering minorities, by not respecting the human rights of anyone – neither women nor men, nor children, nor Christians, nobody. With every passing day the world understands more and more that Hamas operates like ISIS and that ISIS operates like Hamas,” Netanyahu said.

“The State of Israel will continue to stand alongside the civilized world in its war against extremist and violent Islam,” he concluded, the statement read.

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