Ra’am chair Abbas claims Netanyahu once declared: ‘Sinwar and I understand each other’

Ra’am chair MK Mansour Abbas claims in an interview with Channel 12 that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once confided in him that he, Netanyahu, and then-Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar “understand each other.”

According to Abbas, Netanyahu made the cryptic remark during 2021 negotiations with the Ra’am chair about his party’s inclusion in a Netanyahu-led government.

The negotiations, which ultimately failed, with Ra’am instead joining the Bennett-Lapid government, took place during the 11-day Operation Guardian of the Walls conflict with Hamas.

Abbas says Netanyahu told him, then, about the message he received from Sinwar in 2018 telling him to take a “calculated risk” as negotiations for a long-term ceasefire between Israel and the Gaza terror group intensified.

“He put his trust in Yahya Sinwar, went to sleep at night, and abandoned the security of the citizens of Israel,” Abbas tells Channel 12, adding that the revelation of the message from Sinwar to Netanyahu had “shocked him.”

“I have tried to understand what he was telling me, that he and Yahya Sinwar understand each other,” Abbas continues, adding that he is waiting for a state commission of inquiry into the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre so that he can testify about that conversation.

Turning to the present day, Abbas tells the television network that he wasn’t offended but “astounded” by Netanyahu’s remarks during the ceremony for the swearing-in of the 26th Knesset earlier today, when the premier claimed that Ra’am and the Joint List were working for the “destruction” of Israel.

“I was astounded that the prime minister would exploit a state occasion to lie, to incite and to spread blood libel about the Arab parties,” Abbas says. “We are law-abiding citizens of Israel.”

“We don’t want to establish an Islamist state or an Arab state,” he reiterates. “This is where the State of Israel was established; we define ourselves within the State of Israel as citizens.”