MADRID 30 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Minister of Defense of Israel, Yoav Gallant, conveyed this Wednesday to the troops in the city of Rafá, in the south of the Gaza Strip, the need for them to continue creating “military pressure” to facilitate the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) release the nearly one hundred hostages that it has still held hostage for more than a year.
“Your obligation is to create military pressure. Our obligation, at the political level, is to reach an agreement. You apply pressure, you do what is necessary; and we reach an agreement because you have created the conditions for us to achieve it,” Minister Gallant has stated, according to ‘The Times of Israel’.
Thus, the Defense Minister has insisted that this is Israel’s “most important mission” currently in the Gaza Strip. “We have normal tasks: one is to maintain the defense of the communities and the (military) forces, and the second is to maintain the freedom of action to do whatever is necessary within the Gaza Strip.”
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a series of attacks on Israeli territory that left almost 1,200 dead and in which the militia took about 240 people hostage. This event motivated the bloody response of the Israeli Army, which then began an offensive on the Gaza Strip that has already left more than 43,000 Palestinians dead.
The parties have barely reached any agreement, with the exception of a pact for a temporary ceasefire reached at the end of November last year. That agreement also included the release of a hundred hostages in exchange for three times as many Palestinian prisoners. Among the freed hostages and those who have been rescued by the Army – alive and, for the most part, dead – it is estimated that around one hundred people are still held captive by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
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