“The production lines are running again, but the supervision of what’s going into Gaza is more hermetic, so it’s harder for them,” Brigadier-General Shachar Shochat told The Times of Israel. He said the terror groups’ domestic capacity to build rockets would also be determined by the degree to which they diverted construction materials to their war machine. Discussing the 50-day Israel-Hamas war and its aftermath, Shochat estimated that the Iron Dome rocket defense system had saved “dozens, if not hundreds” of Israeli lives, and said that without it, “thousands would have been injured, and the damage to infrastructure would have been colossal.” He also robustly defended Israel against criticism for the deaths of civilians in Gaza — some 2,100 Gazans were killed, according to UN and Palestinian figures, which asserted variously that two-thirds to three-quarters of the dead were civilians. Israel said about 1,000 of the dead were Hamas and other gunmen. “We made supreme efforts to minimize harm to noncombatants,” said Shochat. “There is careful control of everything from the choice of targets to oversight of the operation in real time. Other armies come to learn from us how we minimize the impact on noncombatants.”
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 19:40:36 +0000
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