Israel on Friday said India may not have made a public expression of support to Israel during the last few days, but it understood what Israel was doing and why, Israel Charge d’affaires Rony Yedidia Clein said here.
“Just imagine what would have happened if rockets had been fired on Delhi as they were fired on Jerusalem on the first day of the campaign? Every country has the right to defend its sovereignty and its citizens … Loss of life is tragic,” she said.
Making these assertions while lauding the truce reached between Israel and Hamas on Thursday, she also said, “So far it has been quiet. So far, the calm has been kept. We hope that it remains that way and that there will not be any firing from Hamas.”
Interacting with media in a virtual conference, she said the future course of the ceasefire will be determined by ground realities.
Justifying her country’s military action, she said, “We do feel satisfied that we have had very precise hits on Hamas’ infrastructure. We have been able to greatly degrade their capabilities of hitting or striking at Israel. We do feel that the underground infrastructure (of Hamas) was very severely damaged. We had a large amount of targets which were successfully hit.”
Moreover, Israel neutralised a vast majority of capabilities of Hamas and of Islamic Jihad, she said, adding, “So, I believe that we’ve had good results for this campaign and hopefully going forward there won’t be any more strikes from Hamas towards Israel. But going forward we need to see that the calm remains on the ground.”
Clein said the Israeli military campaign was successful and “we gave a crushing blow to Hamas and their terror infrastructure. We hit hundreds of rockets at Hamas targets and have destroyed their underground rocket making and storing infrastructure around Gaza”.
Among those eliminated were top leaders of Hamas, including their heads of cyber, design and engineering projects and the brigadier commander of Gaza city, she said, adding a number of buildings housing Hamas’s offices and infrastructure were also destroyed.
Informing that so far the ceasefire was holding, the Israeli envoy said, “We hope that going forward, Palestine will reject the Hamas leadership.”
She hoped that the new leadership would have moderates who will see the advantages of having peace with Israel. In fact, she reiterated that Hamas was worried that Palestine would go the way of the neighbouring Muslim nations and try to normalise ties with Israel. Palestine is gearing up for elections.
The Israeli envoy claimed that her country got “unprecedented support from countries around the world” and said some European nations flew the Israeli flag from their official buildings in solidarity.
She mentioned that the Abraham Accord which Israel had forged with four countries -- UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan-- would go forward now that the ceasefire had been declared, helping forge stronger ties. Clein said it was telling that the UAE had condemned Hamas firing at the United Nations General Assembly.
She also said, Hamas rockets have “murdered” Israeli citizens during this campaign and many countries have recognised that fact.