News - Haaretz columnist: Hamas attack should be wake-up call for Israel

The former columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Akiva Eldar, believes that the Hamas attack should be a wake-up call for Israel. “You can’t go about normalising relations with Arab countries while also trying to expand into Palestinian territories,” Eldar said in an interview with Al Jazeera. The image of status quo that you [Israel] can keep Gaza under blockade, you can keep expanding the settlements, and the Palestinian will sit back and say we approve your normalisation with the Gulf countries as long as workers from Gaza can make some money, isn’t going to work,” he added. In turn, the Hamas movement issued a statement accusing Israel of attempting to expel the Palestinian people from their land. “The enemy besieging Gaza has planned to surprise it and escalate the aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip, in addition to the settlement and aggression that continues every moment in the West Bank, which seeks to uproot our people and expel them from their land, and the crimes of the occupation against our people in the 1948s, as it stands behind all the killing and assassination operations there, and the occupation’s continuation of detaining our prisoners for decades, and reneging on agreements when he re-arrested those liberated from the swap deal. “For all of this, we are waging a battle of honour, resistance and dignity to defend Al-Aqsa, under the title that was announced by Brother Commander-in-Chief Abu Khaled Al-Deif, “Al-Aqsa Flood”. This flood began in Gaza and will extend to the West Bank and abroad, and every place where our people and nation are present,” says the Hamas statement released by Al Jazeera.