JERUSALEM, Israel
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday rejected US President Joe Biden’s comment that Israel’s approach to the war in Gaza was “hurting Israel more than helping Israel.”
In an interview with Politico,
Netanyahu also disputed the death toll issued by the health ministry in
Hamas-run Gaza, saying their figure includes “at least 13,000 terrorist
fighters” killed by Israeli forces.
If Biden meant “that I’m
pursuing private policies against the majority, the wish of the majority of
Israelis, and that this is hurting the interests of Israel, then he’s wrong on
both counts,” Netanyahu told the publication.
His comments came one day
after Biden said Netanyahu “must pay more attention to the innocent lives being
lost as a consequence of the actions taken” in Gaza.
Biden, who has backed Israel
during the five-month-old war with Hamas but whose frustration with Netanyahu
is growing increasingly visible, aired his criticism in an interview with
MSNBC.
Netanyahu’s failure to bring
home hostages still held by Hamas militants, whose October 7 attack on Israel
triggered the war, has led to regular protests in Israel and calls for early
elections, including in Tel Aviv again on Saturday night.
Netanyahu told Politico that
“the vast majority are united as never before. And they understand what’s good
for Israel.”
He added that his policies
were “supported by the overwhelming majority of the Israelis,” who back “the
action that we’re taking to destroy the remaining terrorist battalions of
Hamas.”
The war in Gaza began with
Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on southern Israel, which killed about
1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli
figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military
campaign has killed at least 31,045 people in Gaza, mostly women and children,
according to Gaza’s health ministry.
But Netanyahu said in the
interview that this figure included 13,000 militants.
The number of civilian
casualties “is not 30,000, it’s not even 20,000. It’s far less than that,”
Netanyahu said, according to audio shared by Bild newspaper, which like
Politico is owned by German publisher Axel Springer.
“How do I know that? Because
our forces have killed at least 13,000 terrorist fighters,” he said, without
elaborating on how that figure was derived.
Hamas is considered a
terrorist group by most Western countries. The group has not said how many of
its militants have been killed in the fighting.
Netanyahu added that Israelis
“say that once we destroy the Hamas, the last thing we should do is put in
Gaza, in charge of Gaza, the Palestinian Authority that educates its children
toward terrorism and pays for terrorism.”
Netanyahu has drawn global
condemnation and defied the United States, which provides Israel with billions
of dollars in military aid, by rejecting calls for a Palestinian state.
Washington’s Secretary of
State Antony Blinken has spoken of reforming the Palestinian Authority, which
has partial administrative authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in a
way that could “reunite” it and Gaza under PA leadership.
But Netanyahu said Israelis
“also support my position that says that we should resoundingly reject the
attempt to ram down our throats a Palestinian state.”
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