ISRAEL’S former ambassador to the UK has defended the country’s decision to cut off water and power to Gaza.

Daniel Taub told GB News: “As you know, we have been working very closely with the international community to try and make sure that supplies…reach the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, particularly in the south.

“But we’re also aware that to date, in the 16 years since Israel pulled out of every inch of the Gaza Strip, humanitarian aid, and that’s including European aid, has been hijacked and abused by the Hamas terrorist organisation.

“I don’t know any country that would continue to supply electricity to a territory where terror organisations are using that same electricity to build, manufacture, and fire the missiles that have been firing on Israeli civilians.”

Speaking to Tom Harwood, he continued: “The crux of the problem, sadly, is that we have an Iranian sponsored terrorist organisation embedded in the Gaza Strip taking its own population hostage.

“You’re right to focus on the fact that not only does it abuse our civilians, the atrocities that we’ve seen, the abuse of shooting people inside ambulances.

“In the Gaza Strip, it claims to have 100,000 militants, none of them wear uniforms, none of them separate themselves from the civilian population. In those circumstances, we do everything we can to try and separate the civilians.”

He added: “We’ve been urging the civilians to move south so they’ll be out of the area of entrenched terrorist occupation there in the Gaza Strip. Sadly, we know that Hamas is forcing many of them to stay.

“It’s locking some of them up and I’d heard this morning that it is actually throwing away people’s car keys. I mean, that’s a horrendous situation, but we cannot allow that tactic to succeed.”