Netanyahu says he’s deeply sorry about October 7, but rejects probe until after war
PM defends prosecution of war, denies intentionally prolonging it; asked if he was ‘rightfully criticized’ by Trump for failures that led to attack, answers: ‘Criticized for what?’
In a lengthy interview published Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once again deflected accusations of responsibility for the Hamas terror group’s October 7 onslaught last year, saying he was “sorry, deeply” that the attack happened, but that his own role in the security failure should be investigated “following the end of the war.”
In the interview with Time magazine, conducted on August 4, Netanyahu was presented with a statement by former US president Donald Trump that Netanyahu has been “rightfully criticized” over October 7. The prime minister responded: “Criticized for what?”
“That it happened on your watch,” his interviewer responded.
Said Netanyahu: “Well, you know, when it happens on your watch, I suspect that I felt the same thing that President Roosevelt felt after Pearl Harbor, and President George W. Bush felt after 9/11. It happens on your watch. You try to see how it could have been prevented. But right now my responsibility is what? To win the war, to make sure it doesn’t happen again, to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities so it doesn’t happen.”
After the war is over, Netanyahu said, “there’ll be an independent commission that will examine everything that happened before, and everybody will have to answer some tough questions, including me.”
The prime minister has so far refused to initiate a state commission of inquiry into the series of failures before and during October 7 — when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, starting the ongoing war — despite frequent calls to do so, including by some coalition members.
In the interview, whose transcript was also published in full, Netanyahu defended his record of allowing financial support for the Hamas-run administration in the Gaza Strip during the many years that the terror group functioned as the enclave’s de facto government, leading up to the ongoing war.
“It wasn’t bankrolling Hamas,” Netanyahu said of Qatari money that flowed into Gaza under his leadership. “It was, in fact, supporting the civilian administration that was run by various officials, many of them non-Hamas.” Successive Israeli governments — not only his own, the prime minister noted — “wanted to make sure that Gaza has a functioning civilian administration to avoid humanitarian collapse.”
He also denied that money flowing into Gaza was responsible for Hamas’s ability to carry out its October 7 attack, asserting that “the main issue” was weapons and ammunition smuggling from Egypt, and saying of the Qatari money, “I don’t think it made that big a difference.”
Furthermore, he said, Qatari money “didn’t prevent me from conducting three full-fledged military campaigns against Hamas.”
Those earlier campaigns, which degraded the terror group but ended with ceasefires and Israeli withdrawals, did not root out the group altogether because “that would require a full-scale ground invasion for which we had no internal legitimacy or international legitimacy,” he claimed.
His primary mistake, Time said he argued, was acceding to his Security Cabinet’s previous reluctance to wage full-on war. “Oct. 7 showed that those who said that Hamas was deterred were wrong,” he said. “If anything, I didn’t challenge enough the assumption that was common to all the security agencies.”
He was also asked, in the transcript: “Why didn’t you take out Hamas earlier? You could have gone all the way in 2014?”
Replied Netanyahu, “No I couldn’t… there wasn’t a consensus. There was, in fact, a consensus among the military that we shouldn’t do it. But more importantly, you can overrule the military, but you can’t, you can’t act in a vacuum. There was no public, no domestic support for such, for such an action. There was certainly no international support for such an action, and you need both in order to — or at least one of them in order to take such an action. I think that became evident right after the October 7th massacre.”
His interviewer Eric Cortellessa then asked: “Israel’s military and intelligence services warned that your judicial overhaul was dividing Israel, and that Hezbollah and Hamas saw it as weakening Israel’s deterrence. Why didn’t you listen to them?”
Replied the prime minister: “They actually made a point to say that that’s not the case in Gaza. They said that it might affect the community overall, other parts of the Middle East, but they were quite specific that it didn’t, didn’t affect Gaza. But the more important thing is, I think that what really affected them, if anything, was the idea of someone refusing to serve. The refusal to serve because of an internal political debate. I think that, if anything, that had an effect, as it turned out…”
Did he think Hamas and Hezbollah “saw this as an opening, the fact that your society was so ruptured and divided?” he was asked.
Answered Netanyahu: “I don’t think that was the key determinant. They’re determined to wipe us off the map anyway. It’s been Hamas’s position throughout, and the plans for this attack actually preceded the judicial reform by, let me check that, but I think it’s about a year.”
‘Not concerned with my political preservation’
Asked about his political future, Netanyahu told Time: “I will stay in office as long as I believe I can help lead Israel to a future of security, enduring security and prosperity.”
He rejected the accusation that he has prolonged the war and sabotaged a hostage-ceasefire deal in order to remain prime minister. In May, US President Joe Biden said people had “every reason to believe” this was the case.
“That’s simply not true,” Netanyahu said of the charge. “I don’t need to. I’m not concerned with my political preservation.” He called the narrative that he is prolonging the war a “canard,” saying, “I’m trying to bring the war to as speedy an end as possible.”
But the prime minister rejected the idea of striking a deal with Hamas to return the remaining hostages in exchange for an end to the war, if this left the terror group in power.
“To leave [Hamas] in place not only means that they would have the ability to repeat the savagery of October 7, but go well beyond that,” he said.
Netanyahu said he is “committed, fully committed, to releasing all the hostages,” but argued that removing Hamas and returning the hostages are “actually complementary goals.” The negotiation process, he said, is “totally a function of the pressure we put on Hamas.”
Asked about the now 10-month-old war’s effect on Israel’s public image, Netanyahu said that when the world treats Israel as a pariah, “that says something about the world, not about Israel.”
He made similar comments about anti-Israel demonstrations on college campuses in the United States. “I’m concerned with it,” he said. “Of course it concerns me. But I think it should concern America too. Because when the young generation supports these murderers, these rapists, these beheaders of women, these burners of babies, then there’s a problem that America has. It’s not a problem that Israel has.”
Netanyahu rejected accusations that Israel has prosecuted its offensive in Gaza unethically or without respect for international law.
The combatant-to-civilian ratio among deaths there is about one-to-one, he said, “an amazing achievement” given how high the civilian death count can be in urban warfare.
Netanyahu also said that the civilian death ratio has gone down as the war has progressed, saying that in the southern Gazan city of Rafah, more than 1,500 terrorists have been killed, and only “a few dozen” civilians, most of them in one incident, when a small-diameter bomb hit a Hamas weapons depot, causing an unintended secondary explosion.
With respect to his domestic politics, Netanyahu defended the inclusion of far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in his coalition, calling their appointments as national security minister and finance minister, respectively, “a natural allocation,” adding: “That’s what the voters decide.”
He rejected the claim that Ben Gvir, in his oversight of the Israel Prison Service, has fostered an environment that is permissive of abuse, amid an ongoing investigation into the alleged sexual assault of a Palestinian terror detainee.
“If there are any transgressions, they have to be investigated, if necessary, prosecuted,” Netanyahu said, calling Israel’s judiciary “the most independent legal system on the planet.”
The prime minister also rejected charges that Smotrich, in his oversight of settlements in the West Bank, is working on behalf of the government to sabotage a two-state solution.
“I’ve not sought annexation,” said Netanyahu, “our goal is to achieve a negotiated solution.” The prime minister said several times that his vision for the Palestinians is that “they should have their own self-governance, but they should not have the power to threaten us.”
As for Gaza, Netanyahu said a plan to replace Hamas must center on “demilitarization and de-radicalization,” stressing that Israel must maintain control of the Philadelphi Route between Egypt and Gaza for security reasons.
De-radicalizing the population, he said, means “changing what is taught in schools, what is taught in the mosque.”
The prime minister said he’d “like to see a civilian administration run by Gazans, perhaps with the support of regional partners,” and said that his government is “working on” starting to create one.
He declined to provide details about regional partners, however, saying: “The less I talk about it, the more likely that we’ll have some success.”
