Ex-Likud defense minister Ya’alon: Netanyahu was ‘prepared to sacrifice the hostages’ to keep his coalition together

Moshe Ya’alon, a former IDF chief of staff who served as a Likud defense minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but is now a major critic, says that if Netanyahu had wanted to send the IDF into Rafah, he would have done so, and would not have withdrawn most of Israel’s forces from Gaza in recent weeks.

Rather, charges Ya’alon in a Channel 12 interview, the prime minister is now planning to blame the Americans for thwarting an invasion of Rafah and thus “for preventing the total victory” over Hamas.

“What’s happening now is that he [Netanyahu] wants to drag out the war. The length of his term in office is the length of the war,” claims Ya’alon. “He doesn’t want it to end. He was prepared to sacrifice the hostages [in order to keep his far-right coalition together]. I say this crudely…”

Adds Ya’alon: “Six months have passed. Every minute that they are there, we pay a heavy price… If we had acted according to the interests of the state of Israel and not the survival of this coalition, the issue of the hostages should have been handled at the start — when the military campaign was not done, and [the issue of] humanitarian aid wasn’t being handled above our heads and we could have used it as leverage.”

For some of the far-right members of the coalition, who want to reoccupy Gaza and resettle it, Ya’alon also charges, the hostages can be left in captivity “until the messiah comes.”