Israel fully responsible for any consequences of overnight strikes on Gaza: Hamas

The Palestinian Hamas resistance movement says Israel is fully responsible for any consequences resulting from overnight airstrikes on the besieged Gaza strip and the regime’s deliberate targeting of homes and civilian buildings.

The Israeli military said in a statement overnight on Saturday that its warplanes had just bombed at least three Hamas positions in central parts of the besieged Gaza Strip, claiming that the three targets were a rocket manufacturing site, underground infrastructure and a military post.

It also said that the airstrikes were in response to two rockets purportedly fired from the enclave against Israel and the projectiles had been intercepted and caused no casualties.

Later on Saturday, Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, strongly condemned Israel’s “barbaric” overnight airstrikes in a press release, saying that the regime in fact targeted several civilian buildings, including a children’s hospital, in the impoverished enclave.

“[Today’s] large-scale destruction caused by the Israeli aggression against Gaza, which targeted a factory, a carpentry workshop, a plastic recycling facility, a mosque, a hospital, a school, a sports ground, and nearby civilian homes, confirms a pre-planned escalation aimed at destroying infrastructure, targeting our citizens’ livelihoods and tightening the noose around their necks in the midst of suffocating siege on Gaza and spreading coronavirus,” the Hamas official said, the Palestinian Information Center reported.

 

The Israeli regime every so often launches strikes against positions in Gaza Strip, accusing the Gaza-based resistance groups of launching rockets from the territory.

The densely-populated coastal enclave is home to some two million people and has been under a crippling Israeli siege since June 2007.

Israeli fighter jets conduct fresh airstrikes against positions in besieged Gaza Strip

Israel says its warplanes have hit several positions in the besieged Gaza strip.

Barhoum further pointed to the so-called normalization agreements between Israel and a number of Arab countries – namely the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco - saying these recent US-brokered agreements in addition to the international silence and Washington’s support for the occupation, “have encouraged” Tel Aviv “to persist in its blockade and aggression and even constituted an official cover-up for its crimes and violations.”

“The Palestinian resistance, which was found to defend our people and extract their rights, cannot condone the continuation of the siege and aggression, and will not abandon its national and moral duty to protect our people’s interests,” the Hamas official further said.

 

Since 2008, Israel has waged three wars against Gaza, where two million Palestinians live under a 12-year Israeli blockade from air, sea, and land. Thousands of Gazans have been killed in each of these deadly wars.

The tight blockade has caused a decline in the standard of living as well as unprecedented levels of unemployment and unrelenting poverty in the Gaza Strip.

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