Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Monday that Israel will hit back hard if Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza resume, speaking just hours before the midnight expiry of a five-day ceasefire.
Netanyahu’s warning came as the clock ticked down to a midnight deadline in Gaza and as Palestinian and Israeli negotiators held crunch indirect talks in Cairo.
The aim is to broker a long-term arrangement to halt more than a month of bloody fighting which erupted on July 8, and that has killed 2,016 Palestinians and 67 on the Israeli side, most of them soldiers.
But Netanyahu said the offensive dubbed Operation Protective Edge, aimed at stopping rocket attacks from Gaza and destroying Hamas’s attack tunnels, “will continue until its objective has been met… restoring calm and security” to Israel.