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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s press conference on Tuesday evening featured many elements familiar from previous such appearances.
Even as he claimed central credit for the return of the final hostage Ran Gvili — the police officer who heroically went to war with a broken shoulder on October 7, 2023 and was killed defending Kibbutz Alumim, and whose body was located by the IDF in a Muslim cemetery in Gaza City on Monday — he characteristically refused to acknowledge any direct responsibility for the original sin, the failure to prevent Hamas’s invasion, massacre and mass abductions.
He hailed the fulfillment of one of the war’s prime and sacred goals, the return of all the hostages — saying repeatedly that, in the face of skepticism and defeatism, he always believed this was a mission possible — but made no mention of the 40-plus hostages who were killed in captivity, those whose return alive he proved unable to secure.
He batted aside concerns that Hamas-backing Qatar and Turkey are heading for influential roles in Gaza.
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He derided the notion of establishing a state commission of inquiry into the disaster, instead promoting his planned politically appointed and mandated panel — “a real commission of inquiry,” he claimed, “that will reveal to you – to everyone – the truth of what really happened.”
He castigated the media for ostensibly peddling falsehoods about him.
He misrepresented legislation he is pushing through the Knesset as designed to ensure a massive increase in military conscription by ultra-Orthodox males, thereby meeting the IDF’s urgent manpower needs and reducing the intolerable strain on the army’s reservists, when it is in fact crafted to ensure the maintenance of the broad exemption of that fast-growing community from military service and thus salvage his partnership with the ultra-Orthodox political parties.
He denied any involvement in the Qatargate scandal, and inaccurately asserted that a judge recently declared that allegations against his longtime aide Jonatan Urich in that case were unfounded.
He continued to refer to the war against Hamas triggered by the terrorist-government’s invasion as the “War of Redemption” — a description coined to avoid any echo of the horrific, unprecedented mass murder of Israelis that launched it, and by extension any echo of his ultimate responsibility as the prime minister on the day and for some 13 of the 14 years that preceded it.
It was relatively long for a press conference of this sort.
He answered numerous questions, including from reporters he knew would have probing inquiries.
He also explained how the imminent reopening of the Rafah Border Crossing between Gaza and Egypt is intended to work — noting that there would be daily limits on the number of Gazans who will be allowed to return (through what will be a European-run crossing, with a Palestinian Authority presence), and asserting that Israel would nonetheless be vetting and checking such returnees. (The IDF indeed has a checkpoint adjacent to the crossing, and intends to carry out security checks on arrivals before they are allowed to make the short journey from the IDF-controlled Rafah area, across the Yellow Line, to the Hamas-run other half of Gaza.
A US Air Force plane with armored vehicles for the IDF arrives at Ben Gurion Airport, October 19, 2023. (Defense Ministry)
And then, at the very end, Netanyahu chose, unprompted, to extend his appearance with an additional series of remarks in which he leveled an incendiary allegation: that an alleged arms embargo instituted by the Biden administration directly caused the deaths of Israeli heroes — soldiers in the Gaza battlefield who lost their lives because, “at a certain stage” of the war, the IDF ran out of the ammunition they required.
He did not say how many soldiers were allegedly killed, or exactly when and where, but he specified that this occurred in situations where, after the Air Force and artillery had tackled certain warzones, soldiers were battling remaining terrorists in and around booby-trapped buildings.
The accusation prompted predictable outrage from former Biden administration staffers, one of whom, Amos Hochstein, branded Netanyahu both a liar and an ingrate. Joe Biden “literally saved Israel at its most vulnerable moment,” Hochstein wrote, elaborating that the administration provided an unprecedented “more than $20 Billion military support,” deterred “a massive regional war,” and saved “countless lives of Israelis.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) and US President Joe Biden embrace at Ben Gurion Airport on October 18, 2023. (Screen capture)
Netanyahu has repeatedly accused the Biden administration of instituting an embargo, and Biden has denied withholding arms apart from a batch of 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs amid concerns about their potential use in densely populated areas. But the prime minister had never previously specified that this ostensible embargo included vital ammunition for ground troops whose absence caused the direct loss of Israeli soldiers’ lives.
There were reports during the war of shortages of tank and artillery shells, but the IDF at the time consistently played down the significance of the issue.
In briefings with military correspondents, officials repeatedly gave assurances that military operations were not affected, and that soldiers would not be sent on missions without adequate means to carry them out. No military probe to date has found that a soldier was killed because the necessary ammunition was not available.
Amid speculation about the thinking behind Netanyahu’s unprompted allegation — he noted that the alleged embargo ended as soon as US President Donald Trump took office — the fact is that issues of this nature would fall firmly within the remit of a state commission of inquiry.
This is the commission that, with its authority to issue subpoenas, is so manifestly necessary to probe everything that went wrong surrounding October 7, and to ensure there can be no recurrence.
This is the independent inquiry that, correctly fearing its conclusions regarding his principal culpability, Netanyahu has stubbornly resisted for the more than 27 months since the gravest catastrophe to befall our revived modern nation.
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