Major Doron Spielman from the IDF spoke to Sky News about the resumption of fighting against Hamas in Gaza.
In response to US Vice President Kamala Harris’ statement regarding the devastating images and videos coming from Gaza, that too many innocent Palestinians have been killed, Major Spielman stated that “it's important to hear everything, but we still have 137 hostages inside Gaza, including 17 women and children. This means that Hamas has broken our agreements and still holds 17 women and children, including the Bibas family. So, there's no obvious choice but to go wherever the enemy is holding our loved ones and our civilians and try to defeat them.”
He continued, “The challenge is that Hamas is holding not only our own people as hostages, but they're also holding their own civilians as hostages. We are concerned about the death of any civilians, the Israeli civilians and also the Gazan civilians. These people are under Hamas control. Hamas isn't even letting them move out of the way. This whole conflict was planned by Hamas before October 7th. We now are striving to destroy Hamas while not injuring Gazan civilians. This is very difficult.”
On the question of Gazan residents being notified of IDF targets while not having power to power up their mobile phones or Wi-Fi, Major Spielman responded, “I think that you and all of your viewers saw our hostages being paraded through the streets as they were released to Israel over those seven nights. Hundreds of Gazans were holding their phones and videoing them, so clearly, there's enough power to power their phones when they're parading our hostages throughout Gaza. Now that same power to their phones will be used to get the maps downloaded and look at the flyers [giving them information on IDF attacks].”