The Israeli Defense Minister orders “to take proactive and offensive actions wherever there is danger”
June 20 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, warned on Tuesday that “all options are on the table” after the raid carried out on Monday by the Army in the West Bank city of Jenin, opening the door to an operation to larger scale in the area.
The operation resulted in six Palestinians being killed, including one less, and close to a hundred wounded, as well as eight members of the Israeli forces wounded by the fighting and the explosion of a powerful device as a military vehicle passed by, which caused a “logistical operation” to allow the evacuation of soldiers and vehicles trapped in the area.
Gallant, who visited the wounded at the Rambam Hospital in Haifa during the day, stressed that he has given the order to “adopt proactive and offensive actions wherever there is danger to the lives of citizens and (Israeli) forces,” according to The newspaper ‘The Times of Israel’ has reported.
After that, he published a message on his account on the social network Twitter in which he stressed that the military “operated under fire in difficult circumstances, showing courage”, before stressing that Israel “will act in all ways and will go where either to preserve freedom of action wherever there is a danger to the lives of citizens and forces”.
Security sources cited by the Israeli public television channel Kan have indicated this Tuesday that the authorities suspect a level of influence and financing by Iran to Palestinian armed groups that operate in the West Bank, citing as proof the advanced state of the detonated explosive device Monday in Jenin.
The international spokesman for the Israeli Army, Richard Hecht, explained on Monday in a meeting with the media, including Europa Press, that the device was “quite advanced” and noted that the authorities were investigating the explosive used. He also said that five vehicles and an unknown number of soldiers had been trapped in the area during the fighting, although they were later evacuated in a “logistical operation under fire.”
During the operation, an Apache military helicopter opened fire on “armed people”, in the first time that an attack of this type has been recorded since the Second Intifada, after which Hecht pointed out that the event “will affect how we operate in the area “. “We have to analyze how we carry out our operations, but we are not going to stop,” he settled.
For his part, the spokesman for the Palestinian Authority Presidency, Nabil abu Rudeina, accused Israel of committing “a massacre” and argued that the operation is “an attempt to blow up the area and drag it into a context of violence.” . For this reason, he maintained that the international community, and the US government in particular, must “intervene” to “immediately stop this Israeli madness.”
