Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has vowed to defeat the IDF and “shower” Israeli cities with missile barrages if Israel launches another military campaign in the Gaza Strip – in other words a threat to mass murder hundreds of thousands of Jewish civilians.
“We will break the defeated occupation army if it crosses into the Gaza Strip. We know what we say and mean what we say,” Sinwar said in a speech celebrating the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha in his hometown of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.
“If Israel launches a campaign in Gaza, we will shower their cities with hundreds of missiles in one go,” he added. “If a war occurs, we will strike on the occupation army and break its power once and forever. We are not joking.”
Sinwar then praised the August 1 attack by Hani Abu Salah, a member of Hamas’s border patrol, who wounded an IDF officer and two soldiers as he tried to infiltrate into southern Israel in the area of Kissufim.
The attack, Sinwar said, was a “heroic commando one.”
Abu Salah was wearing a uniform and was armed with grenades and a Kalashnikov assault rifle when he infiltrated into Israeli territory from the southern edge of the Hamas-run enclave.
During his short speech, Sinwar also stated that the series of weekly protests along the border fence “will go on until it achieves its goals.”
Last week an official with Palestinian terror group Hamas told a Lebanese newspaper that in the next major conflagration, should the Gaza rulers feel that Israel is trying to “break” the group, its regional allies will join forces with Hamas.
This was one of the understandings reached between Hamas and Iran during a high-level meeting last month in Tehran, the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese paper al-Akhbar reported (in Arabic).
“If the Israeli enemy launches aggression against the Gaza Strip, and we estimate that it is a confined battle that will not develop into a war to break us, we will face it alone,” the official was quoted by the paper as saying.
“But if the enemy [Israel] tries to break the resistance, the rest of the axis will join the battle,” he went on, in reference to Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah.
The Islamic Republic is a longtime financial supporter of Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, sworn to Israel’s destruction, and the al-Quds Brigades, Islamic Jihad’s military branch. Iran also funds Hezbollah, which is similarly sworn to Israel’s annihilation.
Earlier this month, Iran reportedly agreed to massively increase its monthly payments to Palestinian terror group Hamas in exchange for intelligence on Israeli missile capabilities. Tehran expressed willingness to raise its monthly financial backing to the terror group to an unprecedented $30 million per month, Channel 12 reported, citing an unnamed Arab source.
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