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â€™Israel to use all means in next Gaza warâ€™

26 September 2010 03:38 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. A senior Israeli commander has threatened that the military would not hesitate to use any of its means of engagement in the next war against the Gaza Strip, APA reports quoting Press TV.

"We have less performance constraints there than in other areas, and we will not hesitate to use the many tools in our possession," the commander of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Gaza Division, Brigadier General Eyal Eisenberg, said about possible Israeli offensives on the coastal sliver.

The next war would be a "more painful, complex, and powerful round," he was quoted as saying by Israeli website Ynetnews on Friday.

Eisenberg was among the top military brass to command the Operation Cast Lead, the codename for Israeli armyâ€™s onslaught on Gaza at the turn of 2009. According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), the Israeli act of aggression killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, including 313 children and 116 women.

The United Nations fact finding mission on the Gaza conflict has found Tel Aviv guilty of committing war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the deadly operation.

The report by the UN mission blamed Israel for deliberate targeting of civilians and "systematically reckless" way of using white phosphorus in residential areas, notably on the UN Relief and Works Agency compound in the Gaza City as well as two Gaza-based hospitals.

Eisenbergâ€™s division has recurrently attacked Gaza since 2005, when the Israeli military made a self-proclaimed withdrawal from the Palestinian territory.

Tel Aviv says the war on Gaza and its regular forays were responses to alleged rocket attacks by the Palestinian resistance movement of Hamas.

Eisenberg went further to say that "we have the capability to deal a serious blow to Hamas. We have many tools, and they are all legitimate, even targeting senior officials. And we should not hesitate to use these tools."

Meanwhile, Hamas Interior Ministry spokesman Ihab al-Ghussein said on Thursday that the movement had discovered an Israeli-commissioned network of spies and collaborators in the strip which had "a clear role during the last Israeli war on Gaza."

"Some of the elements "were behind the assassination of leaders of the resistance," he noted.