Netanyahu says that before Oct. 7, he was seen as ‘perhaps the most restrained PM in Israel’s history’

Asked about a growing perception of him as hungry for conflict, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that until the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, he was considered “perhaps the most restrained prime minister in Israel’s history,” and that this changed afterward.

“I was conceived as being politically tough, but militarily very restrained,” he says of his more than a decade in power in which he had bucked frequent right-wing demands to declare full-on war on Hamas, and had cast such a war as unnecessary.

“[This] obviously changed on October the 7th because they were gonna annihilate us. I didn’t think it was just an attack by Hamas. I saw it, as it was, an attack by the Iran axis to try to annihilate us, through a noose of death,” he says, recounting how he vowed at the outset of the resulting war that Israel was going to “change this condition in which they are ganging up on us.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he was once viewed as being "militarily very restrained," but that changed after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack. https://t.co/zrpTgpK8qB pic.twitter.com/bRIM7nxWie

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) May 10, 2026