Rebutting Netanyahu, Gantz says Israel’s priority must be hostages, not Philadelphi
Arguing that PM cares primarily about political survival, former war cabinet members Gantz and Eisenkot call for focus to shift to north and Iran, and for elections
Lazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
A day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out his case for insisting on Israeli control of the Philadelphi Corridor in hostage negotiations, National Unity party chief Benny Gantz called for Israel to do whatever it takes to bring the hostages home, even if it means withdrawing from the strategic area.
“The hostages must be returned, even at a very heavy price,” said Gantz in a Tuesday evening address.
He said that while controlling the Gaza-Egypt border is an important goal as Israel fights to keep Hamas from smuggling in weapons and reconstituting its military, Israel can return to the area when it deems it necessary once the hostages are home.
“The prime minister did not look the public in the eye and tell the truth,” said Gantz. “He won’t bring the hostages home, he won’t truly protect the south, he won’t return the residents of the north to their homes, he won’t prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
Speaking with reporters during a rare press conference in Jerusalem on Monday night, Netanyahu had insisted that control of the 14-kilometer (8.7 miles) strip of land along the Gaza-Egypt border is essential for Israel to achieve its war aims and that maintaining the IDF there is “central” and determines Israel’s very future. “We will not go out. The importance of the Philadelphi Corridor is cardinal — to bring out the hostages, to ensure that Hamas is destroyed, and that Gaza will not again be a threat to us,” he said.
In July, Netanyahu added several “nonnegotiable” demands to Israel’s May 27 hostage deal proposal, including for Israeli control over both the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors.
At his Monday night press conference, the prime minister dismissed the argument that the IDF would be able to return to Philadelphi after the first phase of the proposed ceasefire deal, in which some 30 living hostages would potentially be released, comparing it to past promises that Israel could and would return to Lebanon and Gaza if there were any attacks from those newly evacuated territories.
But Gantz argued on Tuesday that Israel can and “will return to Philadelphi if and when required,” just as IDF forces have done in other key areas of Gaza.
“If he is not strong enough to withstand the international pressure [against a future return to the border strip] – let him put down the keys and go home,” Gantz said of his former boss.
Gantz said there was an inherent contradiction in Netanyahu’s claim on Monday that he can and must resist international pressure so that Israel remains deployed at the Philadelphi Corridor, but that international pressure would prevent a return to the corridor if Israel left it now in the context of a hostage deal.
“Netanyahu can’t claim that he is strong and tough enough to remain there [now], but not strong and tough enough to go back there [later],” said Gantz.
Retaking the corridor would be a “serious operation” for the IDF, “but this is not the existential threat to the State of Israel” that Netanyahu depicted, he said.
Gantz, a former IDF chief of staff who took his party into an emergency government after the Hamas attacks on October 7 but bolted the coalition in June, said that Israel’s security establishment is pushing for a plan to block smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border — Hamas’s real avenue to rearmament — but Netanyahu won’t move it forward.
He also accused Netanyahu of lying to the public and consistently getting in the way of a hostage deal.
“During the period that we sat in the War Cabinet,” charged Gantz, “Netanyahu delayed the progress of the talks in a serial manner, including during the first deal” — in November, when 105 hostages were released.
Netanyahu, he said, also “hesitated” and thus thwarted what would have been the earlier expansion of the war to southern Gaza’s Khan Younis and later to Rafah.
“Netanyahu is dealing with political survival, and harming the strategic relations with the United States, while Iran is moving toward a nuclear weapon,” argued Gantz.
A source familiar with the ongoing hostage release-ceasefire deal talks told CNN that the Israeli premier had torpedoed negotiators’ efforts with his public comments on Monday.
Many Israelis blame Netanyahu for the mounting number of dead hostages and have been calling for a hostage-ceasefire agreement to free the 97 abductees taken on October 7 who are still held in Gaza — even if that means ending the conflict.
Mass demonstrations that swept the country on Sunday and Monday after the news of the execution of six hostages by Hamas were the largest show of support for a hostage deal since October 7, when some 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists burst across the border into Israel, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
Netanyahu’s rule relies on support from his ultranationalist coalition partners, who oppose any deal that ends the war or sets free Palestinian security prisoners convicted of killing Israelis. They have vowed to topple the government should Netanyahu agree to a ceasefire — a step that would trigger elections and remove the prime minister from office.
In his address, Gantz called for Israel’s focus to shift to the north, and for the IDF to “go on the offensive” against Hezbollah so as to enable Israelis evacuated from communities near the Lebanese border to return to their homes.
Israel’s main threat, he argued, is Iran, and not Hamas alone: “The Philadelphi axis is an operational challenge, but it is not the existential threat to the State of Israel; Iran’s axis of evil is the existential threat to us.”
Israel’s sources of resilience were being torn apart under Netanyahu, Gantz said, citing “the economy, the preservation of the people’s army, the internal security that is being eroded, the democratic constitutional structure.”
Gantz called for elections that would lead to a “government of national consensus that will be worthy of this wonderful nation.”
National security, said Gantz, comes when “the leading interest is the national interest, and not the narrow personal and political.”
“And dealing with the real existential threat,” he concluded, addressing Netanyahu, “you are no longer able to do.”
After Gantz, National Unity MK and former IDF commander Gadi Eisenkot rose to speak, saying that he was worried by Netanyahu’s “delegitimization” of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and IDF officers.
Echoing Gantz, Eisenkot said that Israel’s “strategic position will not rise and fall over the Philadelphi Corridor, and the security establishment will know how to provide a solution to this, with the understanding that the highest priority task is the return of the abductees.”
He also accused Netanyahu of neglecting the Iran threat.
In response to Gantz’s and Eisenkot’s addresses, Netanyahu’s office said the former IDF chiefs should butt out.
A statement by the Prime Minister’s Office listed Israel’s various achievements since National Unity pulled out of the government and the war cabinet in June, including the killings of shadowy Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif and Hezbollah military head Fuad Shukr, a preemptive strike on Hezbollah rockets last month, a strike on Houthis in Yemen and the IDF’s capture of the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, which it termed “Hamas’s armament pipeline.”
“Whoever does not contribute to the victory and the return of our hostages, it would be best not to get in the way,” said the Prime Minister’s Office of Netanyahu’s former political partners.
Gantz and his party bolted Netanyahu’s governing coalition in June over its handling of the war.
Once in opposition, he began making similar arguments to those he made on Tuesday. Days after leaving the war cabinet, Gantz stressed in an interview that the war in Gaza should no longer be Israel’s most urgent priority. Instead, he explained that the government’s and the military’s attention should turn to the hostages and to the north, where the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group has launched near-daily attacks on northern Israel since October 8.
Hamas released 105 civilians during the weeklong truce in late November, and four hostages were released before that. Eight hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 37 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
