Netanyahu erroneously refers to ‘November 7 massacre’ in interview
Hostage families issue statement reminding PM catastrophic Hamas attack took place on October 7; Lapid snipes slavishly pro-Netanyahu right-wing journalist would back PM’s version
Michael Horovitz is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel
During a US media interview on Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas’s October 7 slaughter in southern Israel the “November 7 massacre,” marking the third time he has publicly mixed up the date of the worst catastrophe in modern Israeli history.
Speaking to the “Fox and Friends” morning show, Netanyahu was explaining the current challenges of reaching a hostage-ceasefire deal with the terror group when he slipped up.
“They just want us out of Gaza so they can retake Gaza, and do, as they vowed to do, the November 7 massacre, butchery, again and again and again,” Netanyahu said, without correcting the error.
Earlier this week at a press conference, Netanyahu made a similar mistake, when declaring it was important to be united against “a cruel enemy who wants to destroy us all, Jews and non-Jews.”
“We discovered this through the war. Not just on October 9, and we discovered it in the execution of six of our hostages,” he said, referring to the murder of captives by Hamas terrorists in Gaza late last week.
In another such incident, at a Knesset Holocaust memorial event in May, Netanyahu said the Holocaust “was equal to 5,000 November 7s,” then quickly corrected himself to “October.”
ושוב זה קורה לו:
״טבח 7 בנובמבר״ pic.twitter.com/IZTSs8C3KL— Yuval Ganor (@yuval_ganor) September 5, 2024
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which has been pressuring the government to reach a hostage-ceasefire deal, released a statement later Thursday that sought “to remind the prime minister that the massacre occurred on October 7, not on November 7 or October 9.”
Opposition Leader Yair Lapid sniped that Yinon Magal, a prominent figure on the right-wing Channel 14 network who staunchly supports Netanyahu, would stand by the premier’s remarks.
“Yinon Magal: ‘If he says it was in November, it was in November’,” Lapid posted on X.
