Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that there is a “battle for truth” raging amid Israel’s eight-front war with Iran and its proxies.
At Newsmax’s U.S. Independence Day reception in Jerusalem, he stressed the importance of combating the “mutilation of truth,” and thanked the outlet for “standing up with Israel, standing up for the truth.”
Netanyahu took aim at the narrative that Israel is deliberately starving people in the Gaza Strip.
“The only deliberate starvation policy that we see in Gaza is the starving of our hostages,” he said on Wednesday. “You can see that when you look at their captors and you see our emaciated hostages and these corpulent tormentors.”
If Israel did actually have a deliberate starvation policy, then “everybody in Gaza would be dead,” he said.
Israel has sent 1.9 million tons of food and medical aid into Gaza, but “Hamas began to loot, rob, kill, take over humanitarian aid,” he said.
Netanyahu said that Israel had tried to implement its own system, in which “American companies would distribute the aid directly to Palestinian civilians,” but Hamas “shot their way in, created riots, created every interdiction possible, and so we had a period of deprivation.”
“Hamas caused the hunger problem, Hamas caused the shortage problem and Israel is blamed, again falsely,” he said.
He noted that there has been a “humanitarian surge” for safe distribution of aid to Gaza civilians, which includes airdrops and quadrupling distribution points.
“Now hundreds of trucks go in daily and that hunger problem, that deprivation problem, has basically been solved,” he said.
But “the campaign of lies” against Israel has not stopped, he continued, highlighting the photo of an emaciated child published in The New York Times. Netanyahu pointed out that the child’s brother and mother in the photo appeared healthy and that the child was afflicted with cerebral palsy.
In the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of spreading disease, poisoning wells and killing Christian children to use their blood in matzah, and these “lies, horrific as they were, propelled antisemitism right into the 20th century into the worst massacre of them all, the Holocaust,” Netanyahu said. “The Nazis pretty much said the same thing.”
What’s happening today, he said, is the “same phenomenon.”
“Then we had no defense. Now we have a country, now we have an army and now we fight back,” he said.
He also noted that Israel today has a “great ally” in U.S. President Donald Trump and the American people, as most Americans realize “we are fighting the barbarians at the gate.”
“It’s not only the goal of destroying Israel. It’s even the method that they use to murder and mutilate the ‘heathen’ as they call them, and we saw that on Oct. 7 in the murder, the rape and beheadings,” the Israeli premier said, referring to the Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Though on American campuses there are those who side with Hamas, “a lot of the people who join them don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said.
Israel, he said, had “stopped the savage massacre of Druze” in Syria, alleging that jihadists there committed atrocities similar to those of Oct. 7 but “added a few things.” He claimed there was a video showing one of the militants ripping a man’s heart out and eating it.
“This is savagery, this is barbarism, this is what Israel is fighting on behalf of Western civilization,” he continued.
The Jewish state can defend itself militarily, but there needs to be a fight against the “mutilation of the truth that threatens our common future,” he said.
If you’re not ready to “fight for freedom, you will lose it. If you do not fight for your civilization, you will lose it,” Netanyahu said.
