Israeli general admits to ‘highest ever rate’ of rocket attacks

In a press conference on Sunday, Major General Ori Gordin said Palestinian resistance groups based in Gaza had fired around 3,000 rockets toward the occupied territories over the past several days, surpassing the pace seen during an escalation in 2019 and the 2006 war with Lebanon's Hezbollah resistance group.

Retaliatory rocket attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad against Israeli targets come in response to Israel’s relentless airstrikes on the densely-populated enclave.

According to Palestine’s health ministry, 197 Palestinians, including 55 children and 33 women, have so far been killed and 1230 others injured in Gaza in the latest round of aggression by the Israeli regime that began on Monday.

Gordin, who is commander of the Zionist regime's home front, displayed a graphic that showed some 570 rockets had been fired from Gaza toward Israeli targets over three days of conflict between Israeli forces and Islamic Jihad in November 2019.

The high-ranking commander also said that in the 2006 war with Hezbollah, a total of 4,500 rockets had been launched against Israeli targets over the course of 19 days.

When asked whether the latest conflict has seen the highest rate of rockets being launched against Israeli-occupied territories, he said, “Not only do I agree, this is what I present.”

In an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 on Saturday evening, Avigdor Liberman, the regime’s former minister of military affairs, harshly criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the way the current conflict with Palestinian resistance groups, particularly Hamas, has been playing out.

Liberman, who was Netanyahu’s former ally, called on Israelis to ask themselves the question, “If this is our situation against Hamas, what will our position against Hezbollah and Iran look like?”

“Netanyahu endangers our existence and leads us to destruction,” the leader of the Yisrael Beytenu party stressed.

Pointing to Israel’s weakness in the face of the Palestinian resistance groups, Liberman said “the Arab world is watching us and will say what will Israel’s position be like against Hezbollah and Iran if its position against Hamas is like the way we see now.”

“The strategic goal of this round of conflict is to improve Netanyahu’s status among the Israeli public, in order to drag us to fifth elections… So long as the mandate to form a government is with Yair Lapid, Netanyahu will try to drag out the conflict,” Liberman added.

“Hamas for the first time created an internal front against us inside Israel. Hamas has taken control of the Palestinian streets. The winner of this operation is Hamas,” he further noted.

Liberman noted that the current operation against Gaza would be vain if it ended without the disarmament of Hamas and the return of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers.