“This is just the beginning,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday as Israel’s bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip intensified on its third day.
Israel’s war cabinet approved plans to broaden the bombing campaign, which has killed dozens of Palestinians so far, including children.
Israeli ministers were reportedly unanimous in their refusal to accept any ceasefire yet.
“We will hit them with strikes they have never dreamed of,” Netanyahu said as he announced the assassination of senior Hamas commanders earlier on Wednesday.
In a recorded address to Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz threatened more destruction than he ordered in Gaza in 2014.
At that time, he was Israel’s chief of staff commanding the 51-day assault that killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children.
“Gaza will burn,” Gantz said in the video, a direct threat to civilians that likely constitutes evidence of premeditated intent to commit war crimes.
“Gaza residents, the last time that we met on Eid al-Fitr, I was chief of staff during Operation Protective Edge,” he says in the video over footage of destruction.
“Ever since, Gaza is still trying to rehabilitate itself,” he adds.
“If Hamas does not stop its violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.”
Gantz accused Hamas of operating out of civilian neighborhoods in order to justify what he said would be “more extensive and intense” damage in Gaza.
Netanyahu’s Arabic spokesperson Ofir Gendelman used a fake video on Tuesday to accuse Hamas of using “human shields” by “firing rockets at Israel from populated areas.”
Bezalel Smotrich, a member of Israel’s parliament, called on the military to “flatten the Strip,” in a tweet on Tuesday.
Smotrich is the author of a plan to expel Palestinians, which Daniel Blatman, a prominent Israeli scholar of the Holocaust, has called potentially genocidal.
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