On Sunday, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed his intelligence agencies shared information with the United States indicating Hamas shared an office building with The Associated Press. The building was demolished during an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) airstrike earlier this week.
“We shared with our American friends all that intelligence,” Netanyahu said on “Face The Nation.” “Here’s the intelligence we had: it’s about Palestinian terrorists, an intelligence office for the Palestinian terrorist organization, housed in that building, that plots and organizes the terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. So it’s a perfectly legitimate target.”
The prime minister went on to say Israel took special precautions to ensure no civilians were killed in the airstrike.
“No people were killed,” Netanyahu explained. “Now imagine, ask yourself, ‘how is that possible?’ You see these highrise towers that are used by Hamas. Over and over again they collapse and no one is killed. Why does that happen? Because we, unlike Hamas, take special precautions to tell people to leave the building, leave the premises.”
“We make sure everyone is gone before we bring down those terrorist facilities,” he said. “And that’s the difference between Israel and Hamas. They deliberately target our cities, deliberately target our civilians. They glorify the death of children and they civilians and old people. They’re happy with it. I think they are happy with any deaths that are caused to them. We grieve for every non-combatant loss in Gaza and we grieve for all our civilians who die. We’re not happy with it and we try to minimize it.”
Netanyahu says Israelis possessed intelligence that Gaza City building that housed international press also housed Hamas offices, without offering specific proof when asked: “It is a perfectly legitimate target.” pic.twitter.com/Dg9rQ7Tkwh
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 16, 2021
After the airstrike, the IDF released the following statement:
A short while ago, IDF fighter jets struck a multi-story building which contained military assets belonging to the intelligence offices of the Hamas terror organization.
The building contained civilian media offices, which the Hamas terror organization hides behind and uses as human shields. The Hamas terror organization deliberately places military targets at the heart of densely populated civilian areas in the Gaza Strip.
Prior to the strike, the IDF provided advance warning to civilians in the building and allowed sufficient time for them to evacuate the site.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, “The IDF’s strikes on terrorist targets inside Gaza comes after terrorists with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have fired approximately 3,000 rockets at Israeli citizens over the last week, killing nearly a dozen people and wounding hundreds. Out of all the rockets that the terrorists have launched at Israel, approximately 450 have landed inside Gaza.”
Members of the “Squad,” including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), were quick to blast Israel’s right to self-defense. Omar went so far as to call Israel’s actions an “act of terrorism,” The Daily Wire reported.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.