Netanyahu: I’ll judge Sharaa by actions; Israel will retain ultimate security responsibility in Gaza

After Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa met with US President Donald Trump in Washington earlier this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he will judge the new Syrian leader by “what happens on the ground.”

“Does Syria become a peaceful country?” he says in an interview with Australian TV personality Erin Molan. “Does he weed out the jihadists in his own military? Does he work forward with me to achieve a demilitarized zone in southwest Syria that abuts the Golan Heights?”

“What do we do to secure our Druze brothers, the Syrian Druze brothers of Israel, who were mutilated, massacred, almost as bad as in the October 7th massacre that was conducted by Hamas in Gaza?” he asks.

He says if there is demilitarization of southwest Syria and permanent protection for the Druze there, “we can move on.”

“When I look at Al-Sharaa, I’m going to look at what is actually being done, what is actually being achieved.”

Netanyahu also denies that Washington prevented Israel from finishing the job in the June war against Iran. “We had a very clear set of targets,” he says. “We were absolutely clear. We wanted to target the nuclear sites, the missile production sites, and a few other targets. We made that clear. When that was achieved, the war ended.”

“There was one possible more strike, and that was it,” he says. “It wasn’t something that we were stopped or we didn’t intend to follow our war plans.”

Turning to the future of Gaza, Netanyahu says that Israel “will retain overriding security responsibility, because we don’t farm out our security to anyone else, not in Gaza or not in any other front.”