Ya'alon: Hamas won't renew rocket fire at Israel anytime soon
Defense minister says Israel is working to stabilize the reality on the ground, will supervise any passage of construction materials into the Gaza Strip.
Hamas will not renew rocket fire at Israel in the foreseeable future, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon told reporters on Tuesday.
"There are no signs (rocket) fire from the Strip will resume at the end of the month, with or without the renewal of the ceasefire talks in Cairo," the defense minister said.
"We're working to stabilize reality on the ground by increasing the (Gaza) fishing zone to 6 miles and allowing more trucks through the Kerem Shalom crossing, from an average of 250 a day to an average of 380 a day."
Ya'alon said Israel, UN Middle East envoy Robert Serry and the Palestinian Authority will introduce a special supervision mechanism within a month that would allow the passage of construction materials into the Gaza Strip for the first time in a year, including for the private sector. These construction materials are meant for the rehabilitation of Gaza after IDF attacks caused extensive damage to structures.
Ya'alon said there would be very strict intelligence supervision of the construction materials to ensure that they are not used to rebuild Hamas' terror tunnels.
The defense minister also responded to criticism of the defense establishment's conduct during the operation.
On claims Military Intelligence failed to predict Hamas' intentions to launch a campaign against Israel, Ya'alon said: "Military Intelligence lived up to expectations and delivered the goods to the political echelon and senior military command. There was no warning of a war in July because Hamas did not think of a war in July. We did note the summer was a potential time for a war because of several events that were happening at the same time, among them the end of peace talks."
On claims the ground campaign was not creative or planned well enough, the defense minister asserted that "war is not a matter of gimmicks. Locating 7,000 targets and attacking them from the air, sea and land is not creative? It's effective."
He went on to say that "those who wanted a repeat of the Operation Entebbe in Protective Edge will not find it despite the fact there were missions that were kept a secret. I won't risk soldiers' lives for gimmicks. And when there's no choice, we'll go on a ground operation as we did against the tunnels."
Despite harsh criticism against the UN-appointed commission to investigate possible war crimes committed during the operation, the defense minister did not rule out the possibility of cooperating with the investigation.
"I can present our version to any reasonable body, as I've done with the president of the Red Cross and the UN Secretary General when I showed them entrances to tunnels and rocket launchers in Saja'iyya and in a village in southern Lebanon," he said.
"We need to examine the issue. We don't need a commission like that because we know how to examine and investigate ourselves. If a commission like that has already drawn conclusions and starts its investigation with preexisting prejudice - like the one that determined in advance there was a massacre in Jenin when there wasn't one, or the Goldstone Commission - we won't cooperate with it," Ya'alon added.
