A Hamas official on Wednesday acknowledged that 50 of the 62 Palestinians reported killed during Gaza border riots on Monday and Tuesday were members of the Islamist terrorist group, bringing the total number of known members of terror groups among the fatalities up to 53.
“In the last rounds of confrontations, if 62 people were martyred, Fifty of the martyrs were Hamas and 12 from the people. How can Hamas reap the fruits if it pays such an expensive price?” said Hamas official Salah Bardawil in an interview with the Palestinian Baladna news outlet.
Questioned about the figures by the presenter, Bardawil said they were “official numbers..
Hamas spokesman Fawzy Barhoum did not confirm all 50 were members of the Islamist movement. He told AFP Hamas paid for the funerals for all 50 “whether they are members or supporters of Hamas, or unrelated to the factions.”
Bassem Naim, another senior Hamas official, declined to confirm or deny the number but said it was a “large movement and has great popular support.”
It was “natural to see members or supporters of Hamas in large numbers” in such a protest, he said, adding that when they were killed they were “participating peacefully” in demonstrations.
The Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad had said on Tuesday that three members of its Saraya al-Quds military wing were killed by Israeli forces in Khan Younis.
The Israeli military shared a portion of Bardawil’s interview with an Arabic news outlet, accompanied by English captions.
Hamas official, Dr. Salah Al-Bardawil is clear about terrorist involvement in the riots pic.twitter.com/p5My6JGQRr— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) May 16, 2018
“This proves what so many have tried to ignore: Hamas is behind these riots, and the branding of the riots as ‘peaceful protests’ could not be further from the truth,” said IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus.
According to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, 62 people in total were killed during border clashes on Monday and Tuesday.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas Tuesday of deliberately putting children in the line of fire amid an outcry over violence on the Gaza border in which dozens of Palestinians were killed during clashes with the Israeli army.
Netanyahu told US television that troops were left with no choice but to use lethal force during protests on Monday, and responsibility for the deaths lay entirely with the terrorist group that runs the Gaza Strip.
“We’ve tried to minimize casualties, they are trying to incur casualties in order to put pressure on Israel which is horrible,” he added. “These things are avoidable. If Hamas had not pushed them there, nothing would happen. Hamas holds responsibility for doing this and they’re deliberately doing it.”
A string of foreign governments have voiced alarm about the use of live fire against the protesters, with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accusing the Jewish state of “state terror.”
But Netanyahu said other countries would have done the same to prevent its borders being breached.
“I don’t know of any army that would do anything differently, if you had to protect your border against people who say ‘we are going to destroy you and we are going to flood into your country,'” he said.
“You try other means, you try all sort of means, you try non-lethal means and they don’t work so you are left with bad choices, it’s a bad deal. You go for below the knee and sometimes it doesn’t work unfortunately,” the prime minister added.
The US government has also placed the blame for the violence with Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and does not recognize Israel’s right to exist.
Speaking at the UN on Tuesday, US Ambassador Nikki Haley said Hamas would have been “pleased with the results from yesterday” when 60 Gazans were killed.
“The Hamas terrorist organization has been inciting violence for years, long before the United States decided to move our embassy,” she told an emergency meeting of the Security Council.
The IDF said Hamas and other terror groups had used the protests as cover to carry out attacks against Israel, including shooting at troops and trying to cross the border fence.
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