The agreement, announced yesterday, between Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz to form an emergency government to prosecute the war against Hamas, was followed by brutal dehumanizing statements aimed at Hamas. The purpose of such statements is to convince the target that there is no choice but to kill the enemy. All other options have been foreclosed on.
“We saw the beasts. We saw the barbarians we are facing. We saw a cruel enemy,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and National Unity party leader Benny Gantz seated on either side of him, reported the Times of Israel. “An enemy worse than ISIS. We saw boys and girls, bound, shot in the head. Men and women burned alive. Young women raped and slaughtered. Fighters decapitated…. In one place, they set fire to tires around them, and burned them alive.”
“We are fighting with full force, on every front, we have gone onto the attack. Every member of Hamas is a dead man,” Netanyahu went on. Hamas is Islamic State, he claimed, and Israel will destroy Hamas just as the world destroyed Islamic State. “The people of Israel live, and together we will win.”
Gallant called the Hamas onslaught “the worst terror attack the world has ever seen.”
