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Following the end of a week-long truce between Israel and Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces are once again working to “destroy” the extremist group, according to a spokesman.

The IDF’s goal is to destroy the group “so that it cannot commit this crime in Israel again and, along the way, bring our people home,” Major Doron Spielman, an IDF spokesman, told CNN on Friday, as Israeli forces resumed combat missions. “. Against Hamas in Gaza.

Spielman said the military targets remained “Hamas strongholds, Hamas terrorists and places where they launched rocket launchers.”

Sirens sounded in Israel an hour before the end of the truce on Friday morning, warning of the arrival of an intercepted missile. Sirens have continued to sound in Israeli communities surrounding Gaza since then.

“Sleeping Israelis woke up again to the sound of the red siren of Hamas rockets raining down on us again from Gaza,” Spielman told CNN, adding that “there were several rockets” that were intercepted on Friday.

Spielman said that the possibility of resuming the truce is up to politicians, not the army.

He added: “The political level can decide to take the matter in the direction it wants. This is always an option for them. As soldiers, they gave us the order to violate the truce.”
In response to a question about the Israeli army’s attacks on civilian areas in Gaza, Spielman said: “We do not want to see civilians in Gaza die, but Hamas operates directly from those areas, and we have to ask ourselves what is the alternative.”

“If we do nothing, if we surrender, we will only allow Hamas to carry out another massacre like the one that took place on October 7,” he said. “I think this is absolutely unthinkable from a moral standpoint.”
Spielman also said that Hamas was not targeting the forces, “but was directly targeting civilians.”