LATEST: Israel Airstrikes Kill 5 Members of Family
UPDATE 1050 GMT: The Israel Defense Forces are warning Gaza’s residents with texts, recorded messages, and leaflets that they will escalate operations:
The IDF intends to attack terrorists and terror infrastructure across the Gaza Strip. The Hamas leadership, while remaining in underground hiding, disregarding the civilians’ needs and wishes for tranquility, will be pursued.
Israel is currently attacking, and will continue to attack, every area from which terror activities against Israel originate. Every house from which militant activity is carried out, will be targeted.
For your own safety, prevent terrorists from utilizing your property for terror agendas, and stay away from every site in which terrorist organizations are operating. The IDF calls you to distance yourselves from where fire was directed at Israel.
The IDF’s campaign has not been concluded. Beware.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (pictured) has laid out the stark prospect of protracted war, with a ceasefire coming only through Gaza’s leadership begging for a halt to fighting.
Lieberman, who has pressed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a campaign to re-occupy Gaza, said on Israeli television on Friday:
Our strategic goal as a state must be either to defeat or force the surrender of Hamas. Surrender means that Hamas raises the white flag and begs for a ceasefire without any preconditions and requirements.
Defeat means that Hamas has no ability to fire missiles, produce rockets or restore tunnels.
Lieberman maintained that the goal was entirely “realistic”.
Ceasefire talks collapsed on Tuesday after a temporary halt in fighting was broken by Gazan rockets and Israeli airstrikes. There was no prospect of a resumption of the discussions, held in Cairo, on Friday.
The Foreign Minister’s statement came on a day when at least seven Gazans died in Israeli attacks, raising the death toll to close to 2,100 in the 46-day war.
Israeli jets hit 11 targets overnight.
Israel also suffered its first civilian casualty since the opening days of the conflict. A 4-year-old boy was killed in Sha’ar Hanegev near the Gazan border when a mortar hit the car in which he was travelling. An off-duty Israeli soldier was critically injured in Ashdod.
Three Israeli civilians and a Thai worker have been killed in the war. Israel has also lost 64 troops in its ground invasion.
Another 18 Gazans died on Friday when they were executed by Hamas, who said they had been convicted of spying for Israel.
Israel Airstrikes Kill 5 Members of Family
An Israeli airstrike on a house in central Gaza killed five members of a family, including two women and two children, before dawn on Saturday.
The father, mother, their sons aged 3 and 4, and father’s sister died in the attack in al-Zawayda near the Nusseirat refugee camp.
Hamas Leader Meshaal: We Did Not Know of Murder of 3 Israeli Teens That Sparked War
The political director of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, has repeated that the leadership did not know of the plan to abduct and murder three Israeli teens in June, a catalyst for the 46-day war.m
Meshaal acknowledged that the three men suspected of the crime were in his organization; however, he said, “We were not aware of this action taken by this group of Hamas members in advance.”
He added, “We understand people are frustrated under the occupation and the oppression, and they take all kinds of action.”
Hamas has maintained that the men, all members of the same West Bank family, were pursuing a “rogue” operation — a claim supported by some observers who noted that this is not the first case of the suspects acting on their own.
Israel insists that the Hamas leadership directed the abduction, which led to hundreds of Palestinians — including most of Hamas’s senior membership in the West Bank — being detained.