Israeli PM Netanyahu: Hamas is to blame for dead Palestinian civilians

last updated 8 January 2015

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Hamas bore responsibility for the heavy civilian casualties piling up on the Palestinian side as a result of Israel's incursion into Gaza.

"We regret any civilian deaths but those lay entirely at Hamas' door," he said on ABC's This Week. More from Netanyahu:

What Hamas is doing very cynically is embedding its rocketeers, its rocket caches, its tunnels — these terror tunnels in homes, in hospitals, in schools, and when we take action, as targeted as we can, they then use their civilians as human shields. So Hamas is both targeting civilians and Hamas is hiding behind civilians. That's a double war crime, and therefore all civilian deaths as regrettable as they are fall on their shoulders. [ABC]

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Jon Terbush is an associate editor at TheWeek.com covering politics, sports, and other things he finds interesting. He has previously written for Talking Points Memo, Raw Story, and Business Insider.

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