Hadar Goldin’s family criticizes defense minister for failure to mention their son or Oron Shaul in interview with Palestinian paper
The family of IDF soldier Hadar Goldin whose body has been held by the Palestinian terror group Hamas since the 2014 war expressed their disappointment with Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman for failing to mention Hadar and fellow soldier Oron Shaul, whose remains are also with Hamas, during an interview published Monday with the Palestinian al-Quds newspaper.
In the interview, Liberman threatened to destroy Hamas “completely” in a future war, but said that Israel has no interest in initiating a new offensive in Gaza.
The hawkish Yisrael Beytenu party leader told the Arabic newspaper that Israel would be the first to rehabilitate the Gaza Strip, lift the blockade and build crucial economic infrastructure in the Palestinian territory — such as a seaport and airport and industrial zones — if rocket launches, attack tunnels and gun running were to stop.
Israeli officials have expressed support for helping construct a seaport in the Gaza Strip, so long as there’s Israeli oversight to prevent the import of weapons to the Palestinian enclave.
The Goldin family said in a statement late Monday that “it was disappointing to see that the minister in charge of returning the bodies of Hadar and Oron Shaul failed completely to mention them in a key Palestinian paper.”
“It’s despairing to see how much Liberman has grown soft since he took the [defense ministry] post [earlier this year],” the Goldin family added. “Someone who gave [Hamas Prime Minister Ismail] Haniyeh 48 hours to hand over the bodies is now talking about turning Gaza into Singapore.”
In April, before he took the defense portfolio in a political upheaval that saw the ouster from the post of Moshe Ya’alon, Liberman said that were he defense minister, he would give Haniyeh two days to return the bodies or be assassinated. He was roundly mocked for the threat.
Hadar Goldin was killed on August 1, 2014 during a deadly ambush by Hamas fighters in Rafah in southern Gaza in which two other soldiers were killed. The ambush came an hour and a half into an agreed upon humanitarian ceasefire during Operation Protective Edge. Goldin, an officer in the Givati Brigade, was part of a group of soldiers who had found a Hamas tunnel and they were working on decommissioning it when they were attacked. Goldin’s group was targeted, and two other soldiers close to him, Benaya Sarel and Liel Gidoni, were killed in an explosion, apparently detonated by a Hamas suicide bomber.
Shaul was one of seven Israeli soldiers critically wounded on July 20, 2014, when, amid fierce battles in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, his armored personnel carrier became stuck in the middle of a city street and was hit by a Hamas anti-tank rocket. His remains were taken. Israel had pronounced him dead on July 25 that year.
Hamas has claimed to be holding on to their bodies as bargaining chips in prisoner exchange talks with Israel.
In the interview with al-Quds, Liberman made no mention of Goldin or Shaul but warned that if Israel were forced into another war with Hamas, it will be the group’s last war:”We will destroy it completely.”
At the same time, he said, Israel has no interest in reconquering the Gaza Strip, which it evacuated civilians and troops from in 2005 in a unilateral withdrawal. That comment was an apparent turnaround from his repeated insistence in previous years that the only way to stop rocket fire was for Israel to reoccupy the Gaza Strip.
Liberman charged that Hamas has invested over half a billion dollars in military infrastructure in Gaza in recent years, while reconstruction of Palestinian homes destroyed in the 2014 war with Israel has moved at a snail’s pace. The defense minister denied there was direct dialogue between Israel and Hamas.
Liberman also voiced support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and restated his advocacy of a controversial “transfer” of Israeli Arab towns, including Umm al-Fahm, to a future Palestinian state, while Israel would keep major settlement blocs in the West Bank. If the residents of Umm al-Fahm, a large Arab town in northern Israel, “regard themselves as Palestinians, let them live in a Palestinian state,” he said. Current West Bank settlement construction was being done within the confines of existing blocs, he also said.
The defense minister criticized Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for not making difficult decisions and striking a final peace deal with Israel, and for presiding over a corrupt hierarchy. If Palestinian elections were held today, he said, “[Abbas] would be deposed.”
As reported by The Times of Israel