Hamas accuses Netanyahu of reeling out ‘series of lies’ in Gaza press conference

After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out his vision for victory in Gaza at a press conference on Sunday, Hamas slammed the Israeli leader and accused him of telling a “series of lies”. “Netanyahu continues to lie, deceive and try to mislead the public. Everything Netanyahu said in the press conference is a series of lies, and he cannot face the truth; instead, he works on distortion and hiding it,”said Taher al-Nunu, the media adviser to the head of Hamas’s political bureau, while speaking to AFP.

Addressing media, Netanyahu said that Hamas still has thousands of armed terrorists after nearly two years of war in about a quarter of the coastal strip. He said Hamas had a de facto state in Gaza, which it used “to launch a war of terror against Israel,” and that it will do so again if it is able.

Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank “are educated with exactly the same textbooks,” and the PA maintains a “pay for slay” policy to encourage the murder of Jews, the Israeli premier said.

‘Problem is not absence of Palestinian state’

Bibi also dismissed “the prevailing assumption… that the problem that we have with the Palestinians is the absence of a Palestinian state. And [that] if they were given a Palestinian state, they would stop the efforts to destroy the Jewish state. But the Palestinians were offered a state many times, including in the partition resolution, and they turned it down.”

“They were offered statehood by my predecessors, with lavish, lavish concessions. They turned it down.”

This is “because the Palestinians are not about creating a state. They’re about destroying a state. That’s why they opposed the Jewish National Movement to create a state. It’s called Zionism. They opposed it before the inception of the Jewish state, and they’ve opposed it since. Their goal is the destruction of a state, Netanyahu asserted.

“The real reason that this conflict persists is not because of the absence of a Palestinian state, but the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize the Jewish state in any boundary,” Bibi said.

‘If we had a starvation policy, no one in Gaza would have survived’

He also denied allegations of starvation in Gaza and insisted that Israel allowed sufficient aid in throughout the war, and accused Hamas of disrupting aid flow.

“If we had a starvation policy, no one in Gaza would have survived after two years of war,” Netanyahu said, while claiming that Israel has provided two million tons of aid to Gaza since the outbreak of the war.

The Israeli leader said that the international press had bought Hamas lies and propaganda “hook line and sinker,” and was defaming the Jewish state in a similar way to how the Jewish people were maligned during the Middle Ages.

Then Jews were accused of spreading vermin, poisoning wells and slaughtering Christian children for their blood, leading to pogroms and violence which ultimately culminated in the Holocaust, Netanyahu said.

He singled out the New York Times for running a front-page photo of a “starving” Gaza boy who suffers from cerebral palsy and said he was looking into filing an Israeli government suit against the newspaper which “buried” a correction.