Israel Defense Forces soldiers paid with their lives because of a weapons embargo that ended when U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday.
“I have one more thing to tell you, you can get a translation,” Netanyahu said, speaking at the end of a Hebrew-language press briefing that focused on the return of the remains of Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, the last captive taken during the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023.
“I said we paid very heavy prices in the war—the fallen and wounded, truly heavy costs. Part of this is what happens during war,” the prime minister continued.
Netanyahu noted that Gaza was full of booby-trapped buildings. After the IDF called on the civilian population to evacuate the combat zone, the military initially used artillery and airstrikes to eliminate terrorists who remained in structures rigged with explosives, the premier said.
However, “at a certain stage, we reached a stage where we did not have enough ammunition, and people fell—heroes fell,” he said.
Without explicitly naming the previous U.S. administration, he said that the shortage was in part caused by “the embargo.”
“This embargo situation changed beyond recognition with the entry of President Trump’s administration,” he added. The Israeli premier said he was working on developing a strong domestic army industry “for maximal independence ... so we don’t run out of weapons or ammunition.”
Biden suspended the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs to the IDF in May 2024 to discourage a ground offensive in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, where Hamas terrorists had embedded itself among civilians.
“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those [2,000-pound] bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” the Democratic president told CNN at the time.
Pro-Israel U.S. politicians revealed that the White House had held up far more arms shipments, slow-walking deliveries via bureaucratic means.
Trump lifted all restrictions within a week after returning to office.
“We released them today,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Jan. 25, 2025. When asked why, he said: “Because they bought them.”
Netanyahu at the time thanked the president for keeping his promise of giving the Jewish state “the tools it needs to defend itself, to confront our common enemies and to secure a future of peace and prosperity.”
Amos Hochstein, a top adviser to Biden during his presidency, on Tuesday claimed that Netanyahu was being “ungrateful” to the former president.
“Netanyahu is both not telling the truth and ungrateful to a president that literally saved Israel at its most vulnerable moment,” the former official told Axios.
In a separate post on X, Hochstein charged that after $20 billion in U.S. military support to Israel, the deployment of two aircraft carriers to the region and efforts to help repel Iranian missile and drone attacks, the “only acceptable response” to Biden and America was “thank you.”
During the two-and-a-half-year-long War of Redemption that started after the Oct. 7 massacre, 924 IDF soldiers “fell in battle and fought with bravery in order to achieve the war’s goals and the moral duty to return the hostages,” according to a military statement on Monday evening.
The statement paid respect to all “security forces personnel who risked their lives, the bereaved families who have lost their loved ones and the 20,000 injured individuals in body and in soul who were wounded for the protection of the State of Israel” during the 27 months of fighting.
Israeli soldiers “operated day and night, on the front lines and deep in enemy territory, while greatly endangering their lives, with unwavering determination and a deep commitment to the sanctity of life, in order to establish conditions that would allow the return of all hostages,” it said.
