The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Major General Yoav Mordechai, on Wednesday warned Hamas against an Israeli response due to the group's provocations against IDF soldiers.
"The leadership of Hamas leadership is not able to control its operatives, and will thus lead to an Israeli response against Hamas activists,” Mordechai wrote on COGAT's Arabic language Facebook page.
According to Mordechai, the organization's activists in northern Gaza include attempts to blind IDF soldiers who are stationed along the border using laser markers.
"This situation is dangerous because the continued provocative attempts to blind soldiers carried out by the terrorist operatives, even if not guided by their commanders, is likely to lead to escalation at this sensitive time of developments in the Palestinian arena; therefore, be warned," he wrote.
“The continuation of this phenomenon will lead to an IDF response,” warned Mordechai.
Mordechai, who is fluent in Arabic, often uses Facebook and Arabic-language media to send messages to the Palestinian Arab public and to the terrorist groups operating in Gaza.
Last month, he warned Hamas operatives against digging terrorist tunnels leading into Israeli territory, writing on Facebook, "All that Hamas' people will find in the tunnels is death.”
"It seems that Hamas does not care about its operatives and is sending them to die in the tunnels it digs," Mordechai wrote, adding, "Anyone who enters the Hamas tunnels will have no future or light at the end of the tunnel - only death."
Since Israel’s counterterrorism Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Hamas has been busily reconstructing its terror tunnel network breaching into Israeli territory.
Several dozen Hamas members have died in tunnel collapses in the past year. Mordechai, asked last year by the Palestinian Arab Ma'an news agency whether Israel was responsible for the tunnel collapses, would only reply, “God knows.”
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)