Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett slammed President Joe Biden on Thursday for threatening to stop military aid to Israel if the Jewish nation moves on its plan to attack Rafah in a bid to destroy the last significant Hamas stronghold in Gaza.
During an interview with Erin Burnett on CNN, Bernett called Biden’s decision on the issue “deeply misguided.”
“What are we being told here? We have a radical jihadist terror organization [on] our border that’s telling us it’s going to continue trying to murder as many Jews as possible. Obviously, we have to get rid of it. We have no choice,” she stated.
“Now, talking about civilians, if Hamas is granted immunity because it hides behind civilians, that’s not only a problem with Hamas. That means that the whole global jihad organizations are all going to adopt human shields as the core way of conducting terror. So this would be a profound mistake. And we think that we have really no choice, and we got to do what we got to do,” he added.
Bennett also ripped Biden over his claims that Israel was targeting civilian population centers in its efforts to get to Hamas, leaving out the fact that the country actually sends out warnings to civilians that they need to leave the endangered zones.
“In all wars, all wars, in every urban war in the history of the world, there’s collateral damage, especially when Hamas is using the civilians as a human shield. There’s no doubt. But is Israel using bombs to target civilians? Absolutely not. Never. We never target civilians. In fact, we have the lowest ratio of collateral damage in the history of urban warfare. There’s about, let’s call it, 32,000 Palestinians who died. Half of them are terrorists. That’s one to one,” he stated.
“In Afghanistan, in Iraq, it was one to nine. For every terrorist you killed, there were six, seven, eight, nine civilians. We’re bending over backward in order to prevent unnecessary deaths. Otherwise, we’d get this whole thing done within three days if we didn’t care about it,” he added.
“I think that this decision is deeply misguided.”
Fmr. Israeli PM Naftali Bennett reacts to President Biden’s warning on OutFront that the U.S. could withhold weapons shipments to Israel pic.twitter.com/p827SUJ3Ww
— Erin Burnett OutFront (@OutFrontCNN) May 9, 2024
During a CNN town hall on Wednesday, Biden threatened to withhold U.S. military weapons from Israel if it enters Rafah.
Claiming that “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as the consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden stated, adding, “And I made it clear that, if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gone into Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities, that deal with that problem.”
Slamming Israel’s military campaign against Hamas, Biden continued, “But it’s — it’s — it’s just wrong. We’re not gonna — we’re not gonna supply the weapons and the artillery shells used that have been used.”
