On Saturday morning Israel was attacked by the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas. What was your first thought when you heard the news?
You cannot say that it was a complete surprise because if you live in this area, you are used to this kind of attacks. Hamas is a Palestinian terrorist organization, which is financially controlled, politically supported and motivated by Iran. Let us not forget the whole chain of subordination. Nevertheless, we were surprised by the scale of this attack. What we have here is a thorough organization which targeted innocent people. Most of them civilians, we have, until now, around 350 people who were murdered.
Hamas terrorists attacked them and literally butchered them. We have scores of people, babies, children, women, adults and old people who were abducted by Hamas and moved to Gaza.
And let's not forget the bombardment over half of Israel's territory. No country would tolerate what is happening, and we reacted accordingly. We were surprised by the attack, but time will come when we will investigate and see what happened, what went wrong. Our mission now is to drive out all those terrorists who are still in our territory. And then we will deal a blow to Hamas so that they won't be able to carry out such an attack in the near future.
How is this attack different from the other attacks?
The attacks are usually carried out by firing rockets indiscriminately at Israeli settlements. This time this was only a decoy, because hundreds, if not thousands, of Hamas terrorists infiltrated into Israel's sovereign territory. They attacked around 25 Israeli villages, kibbutzim, and cities. They took hostages, and they just murdered them brutally. You can see those horrific video recordings showing you the misery of the people captured, how they treat them, how they abuse them, how they drag women and children. An elderly lady, a Holocaust survivor was forced to hold a gun and make a V sign with her fingers before she was abducted and taken to Gaza. No one knows what happened to her, and we don't know the fate of many other people. And this is what makes the difference, and we will have to deal with it accordingly.
From our point of view, yesterday was a combination of 9/11 in America and the Bucha massacre in Ukraine.