H.E. Mr. Boaz Modai:

Yes. First of all, regarding the hospital, Deputy Smith may have missed it but I said in quite a few interviews on radio that the main hospital, Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, was used as the centre for Hamas. The base was under the hospital. That is to give some perspective.

In those cases in which Israel was hit by people shooting from hospitals or from places very near to hospitals, we made sure people evacuated a place before we targeted it. By the way, if the Deputy looks at the Geneva Convention, Article 48 states that as soon as a place, even if it is a civilian one - it could be a school, a mosque or something else - is used to shoot from or to bomb the enemy, which is Israel in this case, it can be looked at as a legitimate target. This is how we behaved in this case.

The Deputy mentioned UNRWA. He probably knows that at least three times - we know of a few other cases - Hamas used UNRWA schools as locations for armaments, missiles and so on.

I refer to the people who approached Deputy Smith. I hope the Deputy told them that Israel was not targeting civilians and that Israel was retaliating to its own civilians being fired at. People express views, which I really respect. I am a human being and a father. When I saw on television children being rushed to hospitals, it burned my heart. It was terrible. I can really understand people who care for the lives of other people, especially when it comes to innocent people. The thing is that a lot of people deliberately take things out of the real context, as if Israel is on one side with the strongest army in the area and maybe even in the Middle East, while on the other side is the poor Palestinians, and only civilians. But there is something in between. Israel was first shot at by Hamas and the other terrorist organisation, and only then did we retaliate. Israel did not use even a small part of its power. We were blamed for deliberately killing people, but if that is what we were doing we were doing a very bad job, because if the Israeli army had wanted to kill civilians, the results would have been completely different. One can understand that was not the aim. We should look at both sides and check what was the aim.

Israel is still very much committed to the two-state agreement for the two peoples. It has been said many times by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but I think we have to go back a little bit to understand where all this conflict comes from. This conflict is not about land but about completely different things. It is about the Arab world. I am speaking about the Palestinians accepting Israel as a neighbour in this neighbourhood, because we have been there forever. There are people in the Arab world who say that Israel does not belong there, including Hamas. I think I explained that quite clearly.

During the Oslo talks in 1993 and 1994, the issue of the settlements was never mentioned. It was never agreed that Israel would stop building. When it was a matter of signing a peace deal with our neighbours - for example, in Egypt - there was no problem with Israelis being evacuated from parts of the Sinai and different areas near the Gaza district. We did that. I remind members of what I said before.

In 2005, Israel made a lot of efforts in this regard, which were not accepted well by the people involved. We made a unilateral decision to redeploy from Gaza and evacuated 9,000 settlers, for whom we had to find other places to live. That was not easy, as some here will remember. There were a lot of rallies and demonstrations, but eventually we did it, for peace. We believed that this was an opportunity.

Deputy Smith mentioned compensation for damage, but I think it is better that we do not get into that because then we will have to ask for compensation from our opponents, rivals and enemies for many years of killing, maiming and damaging Israeli cities. We believe that Gaza has to be rehabilitated, and it will be, as soon as it is demilitarised.