Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a veiled rebuke to U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday over the question of attacking the last Hamas terrorist stronghold in Rafah, a town in southern Gaza near the Egyptian border.
“Whoever tells us not to operate in Rafah, is telling us to lose the war – and that will not happen,” Netanyahu said at a graduation for members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) who had completed a training course for combat officers.
Netanyahu’s remarks came hours after David Ignatius of the Washington Post revealed that the White House was considering limiting arms sales to Israel as a way of deterring it from entering Rafah in a final attack to win the war.
Israel says that if it allows Hamas’s four remaining battalions to survive, they will regroup and return to rule Gaza — and to carry out terror attacks and rocket launches against Israelis. In addition, Rafah’s close proximity to Egypt would mean that Hamas operatives could smuggle weapons into Gaza — or people out of Gaza — once the war had ended.
Netanyahu’s full remarks, translated from Hebrew by the Prime Minister’s Office, were as follows:
Soldiers and officers, we are in the midst of a war that could not be more just. The Government set the goals of the war – and you are in the field working to achieve them: Eliminating Hamas’s evil rule, returning home all of our hostages and preventing any future threat to the State of Israel from Gaza.
In this war, the ground forces are at the center: In face-to-face battles, eliminating terrorists, destroying terrorist infrastructure, destroying tunnels, relentlessly pursuing the arch-murderers and in efforts to locate hostages.
I want you to pay attention to what is being said about you, about our IDF. Noted military historian John Spencer, an expert on urban warfare at West Point, the Training Base #1 of the US, says that no army in history has dealt with tens of thousands of armed fighters, dispersed in various cities, who are using the civilian population as human shields, and who hide in hundreds of kilometers of underground tunnels, and despite these harsh and unprecedented conditions, he says that the IDF is achieving the goals of the war with impressive success and is doing so with minimal harm to civilians. And as the historian Spencer notes, with an effort that no other army in the world, in the history of armies, has done.
Today, I want to tell you tell you clearly: The IDF will continue to operate against all of Hamas’s battalions throughout the Strip – and this includes Rafah, Hamas’s last stronghold. Whoever tells us not to operate in Rafah, is telling us to lose the war – and that will not happen.
At the same time, we will take vigorous action in the other sectors, against whoever seeks to destroy us, including on the northern front. Whoever has not yet been convinced by our strength would do well to look at what is happening to the enemy strongholds in Gaza. Our enemies have brought unprecedented destruction on themselves. Those who talked about spider webs – are today meeting lions.
Indeed, there is international pressure, and it is increasing. But it is precisely when the international pressure increases that we must close ranks among ourselves. We must stand together against the attempts to stop the war. We must reject together the desperate attempt to charge the IDF with the responsibility for Hamas’s crimes.
It is Hamas that murdered, massacred and raped our brothers and sisters. It is Hamas that abducted our sons and daughters. It is Hamas that is perpetrating war crimes against its people – and ours – on a daily basis. And we are fighting these monsters in order to ensure our very existence. Even as we defend ourselves, we are defending the most sacred values of the free world and human society as a whole.
Therefore, I say to the leaders of the world: When we defeat the murderers of October 7, we are preventing the next 9/11. The entire civilized world should support the IDF and the State of Israel.
The fighting – and the learning while fighting – are intertwined. This is what the Psalmist says: ‘Who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.’ [Psalm 144:1] We are learning the lessons of the fighting and we are planning – with due consideration – the continuation of the war. In the future, we will learn all the lessons of October 7. We will do so openly and fully. But today we have a clear goal: Achieving total victory in the war.
The Biden White House has attempted to undermine Netanyahu since he was elected in November 2022, with the exception of a few weeks in 2023 when Israel and Saudi Arabia were discussing a possible peace agreement.
The Biden administration supported those efforts, though reportedly stalled them in an effort to convince Israel and the Saudis to include a Palestinian state in their agreement. Not one country has joined the Abraham Accords under Biden.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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