"Israel" warns Palestinians of new Holocaust!?

Source: AFP, 01-03-2008
Deputy Defense (War) Minister Matan Vilnai warned that the Jewish state "will not shy away from any action" to halt the rocket fire from Gaza.
"By intensifying the rocket fire and extending their reach they are bringing onto themselves a Holocaust as we will use all means to defend ourselves," Vilnai told Army Radio.
Hamas held the comment up as proof their enemies were the "new Nazis" and Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas called "Israeli" threats "dangerous".
Ousted Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said: "This is a proof of "Israel's" pre-planned aggressive intentions against our people.
"They want the world to condemn what they call the Holocaust and now they are threatening our people with a holocaust."
Other officials of the occupying regime threatened to launch a larger-scale offensive.
War minister Ehud Barak sought to prepare the way for an offensive by sending confidential messages to world leaders, including US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who plans to visit the region next week.
""Israel" is not keen on and rushing for an offensive, but Hamas is leaving us no choice," Barak told the leaders, according to "Israel's" mass circulation daily, Yedioth Ahronoth.
Security sources were quoted by both "Israel" Radio and Army Radio as saying that a major operation was being prepared but was not yet imminent.
A senior member of Olmert's centrist Kadima party, Tzachi Hanegbi, said the army should prepare to topple Hamas.
The occupying regime pulled its troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005 but still maintains control of the territory's air space, coastal waters and major border crossings.
Hamas has raised the stakes in the confrontation by using Grad missiles, more powerful and accurate than improvised Gazan Qassams, to strike deep into Ashkelon, a major southern illegal settlement of 120,000 people.
Gaza resistance fighters have fired more 125 rockets at Zionist targets since Wednesday, according to the "Israeli" army.
The chief of "Israel's" left-wing Meretz party, Yossi Beilin, said Hamas had offered a truce around Gaza over the past two weeks but the overtures had been rejected by the "Israeli" leadership.
Amid the "Israeli" threat of an impending ground operation, tens of thousands of Gazans protested Friday against "Israeli" raids.
The demonstrators poured into the streets throughout the impoverished and isolated territory in response to Hamas calls to denounce the airstrikes, whose victims include close to 20 civilians, many of them children.
"They've killed my right to childhood," read a sign held by a child, clad in a red-stained white funeral shroud, who attended a large rally in Jabaliya.
Among the protesters in Gaza City was Khalil al-Hayyah, a Hamas leader who lost a 25-year-old son in an airstrike Thursday.
"We will never recognize "Israel", even if it assassinates all our leaders and kills our children," he shouted to the crowd.
Haniyeh told worshippers at a Gaza City mosque that the coastal strip is facing war.
"Gaza today faces a real war, a crazy war led by the enemy against our people," he said.
Haniyeh lashed out at the US administration, which he said backs the "Israeli" attacks by portraying them as "legitimate self-defense".
He also accused the Arab world of "encouraging the "Israeli" aggression" through its silence.
The 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council also condemned the "Israeli" raids and urged the United Nations to rein in the Zionist regime.