Gaza _ agencies
Israeli security Minister Avigdor Lieberman said his army was "ready for war more than ever", adding, "but we are not looking for escalation and adventure, and we hope that the people of Gaza will destroy the Hamas regime."
Lieberman told the Hebrew newspaper Yediot Aharonot that Hamas "heats up" the situation in the Gaza Strip because it "realizes that it loses power and therefore tries to direct the public´s wrath to Israel."
Lieberman continued: " I believe that since 1967, there has been no state of readiness and decency for the Israeli army, as is the case today, "in reference to the war in which Israel occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian Sinai region and the Syrian Golan Heights, according to the Anatolia agency.
Lieberman was commenting on a report by former Israeli Army Complaints Committee official Yitzhak Brik, mid-September last September to the Israeli army chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot and Lieberman, and estimated the Israeli army´s unwillingness to any future war.
Lieberman said: "I read the report, I spoke more than once with Isaac Brick and he has important comments in his report, and I think he is mistaken about one big case on this subject," referring to the issue of the Israeli army´s readiness for war.
"The Army is ready for war, I say this not only because I feel it, but as someone who has been sitting in the government for decades," he said. "
"As a knowledgeable person, we are at the height of readiness since the six-Day War (the 1967 war), and this is not because there are problems, and in the end the talk is about a machine where hundreds of thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands in the Air Force, artillery and snipers," he said.
Lieberman renewed his criticism of Education Minister Nafalia Bint, who said a few days ago that Lieberman´s "self-restraint" policy failed to stop Palestinian protests in the Gaza Strip.
"I suggest the minister built to talk about education, not security," Lieberman said.
"I do not want to invade Gaza, I do not want to grant citizenship to tens of thousands of Palestinians, but I want to preserve a Jewish state," he said.
"All citizens of Israel should decide what they want: a binational state as it wants to be built or as I suggest a Jewish state," Lieberman said.
Lieberman, meanwhile, saw no need for an early general election, scheduled for the end of next year.
"There are those who have already started the campaign, and I see no reason to hold early elections, that we have a functioning government," he said, calling for the elections to be kept on time.
Israeli police investigations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with quasi-corruption and disagreements within the government, have led to the emergence of estimates of possible early general elections.
