Washington: Defending the military strike inside Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said that his country uses missiles to protect its people and alleged that Hamas uses people to protect its missiles.
"We use missiles to protect our people. They (Hamas) use their people to protect their missiles," Netanyahu said. Israel has accepted five cease-fires and acted upon them, he said.
"Hamas has rejected every single one of them, violated them, including two humanitarian cease-fires which we accepted and implemented in the last 24 hours," he said at a talk show of NBC.
"Now Hamas is suggesting a cease-fire and, believe it or not, they've even violated their own cease-fire. So they continue to fire at us," Netanyahu said.
"We'll take the necessary action to protect ourselves, to protect our people, including against the terror tunnels that they're digging under our border and trying to reach and blow up our people. We'll do whatever is necessary to defend ourselves," Netanyahu said.
The Israeli Prime Minister favoured the Egyptian proposal of ceasefire with Hamas.
"I think what we need to do is go to the Egyptian initiative. It will also enable us to get what I think are the pre-requisites of a sustainable period of quiet, and that requires, in essence, the demilitarisation of Gaza," he said.
"That is, we have to demilitarise it from the weapons that Hamas has put in missiles, rockets, terror tunnels. We can't allow them to restock this arsenal or we'll be stuck in another five, six months with the same problem. So we want demilitarisation of Gaza," he said.
"Obviously that would also enable the social and economic relief that the people of Gaza want," he said. Alleging that Hamas is responsible for the death of civilians, Netanyahu claimed Israel is not targeting a single civilian.
"We're responding to Hamas actions and we're telling the civilians to leave. Hamas is telling them to stay. Why is he telling them to stay? Because it wants to pile up their own dead bodies. They not only want to kill our people, they want to sacrifice their own people," he said.
Noting that every Israeli regrets to see a single civilian death, Netanyahu said it is not something that is his responsibility.
"I've also been in combat. I've been to war. And I know what efforts the Israeli army takes to minimise civilian casualties, to direct the target at terrorists. I think everybody understands that," he said.
"The United States has been unequivocal in supporting Israel's right of self-defence and condemning Hamas for using civilians as human shields," he said.
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