Live UpdateFrom the Liveblog of Sunday, January 30, 2022

Netanyahu slams Bennett over his Omicron COVID policy

30 January 2022, 8:20 pm 0 Edit

Opposition leader MK Benjamin Netanyahu attends a plenum session in the assembly hall of the Knesset, in Jerusalem on January 19, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu slammed Prime Minister Naftali Bennett for his handling of the COVID crisis.

“Bennett has put us in first place in the world in the number of patients per capita,” Netanyahu says in a live statement streamed on Facebook. He claims that the cost of Israel exiting Omicron “will be much higher than in other countries.”

Netanyahu says that if Bennett had “limited gatherings and ramped up vaccines for adults and children, we could have saved thousands of patients.” He says that while Bennett never instituted a lockdown, “in practice, Israeli citizens have been in lockdown for three months now — an unofficial lockdown of mass isolation.”