PM says he’s on top of Hamas tunnel threat, as he was in 2014

Netanyahu tells military reporters that he is on top of any tunnel threat from Gaza, rejecting criticism that he was caught off guard by subterranean attack passages used by Hamas in the 2014 war with Gaza.

The prime minister says two months before the war broke out, he demanded that the army beef up its operational planning to thwart the tunnels, rebuffing talk of a state probe to look into failures in the lead-up to the war.

“Defense Edge is not the Second Lebanon War,” he says, referring to the 2006 fight with Hezbollah that spawned a damning state inquiry. “The claim that we didn’t know and didn’t plan for the tunnels is the opposite of the truth.”

Netanyahu says he is continuing to stay on the ball on the issue, noting that he’s held eight meetings on security, some with the cabinet, in the last year and a half. In a number of those discussions, the tunnel threat was addressed, he says, including instructions to the army to find and destroy them.