Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Saturday in an interview with the Qatari network Al Jazeera that he regrets the death of Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya’s son, Hamam, in an Israeli strike in Qatar.
“A child should not be a victim, and his wife was also injured,” Olmert said. “We are fighting terror, and they will be punished when the time comes, but the family is a different matter.”
Funeral of those killed in Israeli strike in Doha
Olmert added: “Killing the negotiating team means you don’t want negotiations and you don’t want the release of the hostages. All Hamas members should be punished, but the strike in Doha was not in the right place or at the right time.”
The former prime minister has criticized Israel’s Gaza policy before. He previously described the planned humanitarian city that the Israel Defense Forces proposed to build in southern Gaza as a “concentration camp,” adding that if Palestinians were expelled there it could be considered “part of ethnic cleansing.” At the time, he said: “It is an inevitable interpretation of any attempt to create a camp for hundreds of thousands of people. When you build a camp to ‘clear’ more than half of Gaza, the obvious understanding is that this is to save Palestinians. It is to expel them, push them out and throw them away. It cannot be understood otherwise."
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Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert: 'All Hamas members should be punished, but strike in Doha was not in right place or at right time'
(Photo: Ariel Schalit/AP)
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Hamam Al-Hayya, the son of Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, was killed in the Israeli strike on a building in Doha
In a BBC interview in May, Olmert said, “What Israel is doing now in the Gaza Strip is getting close to being a war crime.” He called it “a war without a goal, which has no chance of achieving anything that could preserve the lives of the hostages.” He added that “the clear picture” of the war was “thousands of innocent Palestinians being killed, along with many Israeli soldiers.” He described the situation as “infuriating and outrageous from every point of view.”
Hamas announced Tuesday that Maam al-Hayya, son of Khalil al-Hayya, the group’s Gaza leader, was killed in an Israeli strike in Doha. Since then, Hamas has claimed that Khalil prayed over his son’s body but has not released any evidence that he is alive or unharmed.