Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday gave his first public overview of the war that broke out in 2023, which he said resulted in a fractured Iranian axis and a severely weakened Hezbollah, and will lead to Hamas’s removal from power in Gaza.
In an interview published by The Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu offered an analysis of the war.
The prime minister confirmed that Biden officials threatened to cut off U.S. assistance to Israel if the IDF conquered Rafah—and then followed through with what the Journal writer termed a “de-facto arms embargo” after the operation took place in May.
“The Americans said to me, ‘If you go into Rafah, you’re on your own, and we’re not going to send you the critical arms,’ which is tough to hear,” Netanyahu said. “The U.S. withheld critical weapons.”
The choice was existential, he said. “If we don’t go into Rafah, we can’t exist as a sovereign state. We’d become a vassal state and we won’t survive. The question of arms will fix itself, but the question of our independence will not. That’s the end of Israel,” he said.
The U.S. had also opposed the earlier land incursion into Gaza, Netanyahu said, arguing for airstrikes instead. “From the air, you can ‘mow the lawn.’ You can’t pull out the weeds,” he said. “We’re here to uproot Hamas—not to deliver deterrent blows, but to destroy it.”
Netanyahu acknowledged President Joe Biden’s Oct. 18, 2023, visit to Israel.
“It’s the first time a U.S. president came to Israel at a time of war,” he said, “and he sent two carrier battle groups, which was important to stabilize the northern [Hezbollah] front.”
On Biden, Netanyahu added, “It’s not easy to be [U.S.] president, let’s face it, with these very radical fringes in his [Democratic] Party. It wasn’t easy to do what Mr. Biden did.”
President-elect Donald Trump “has supported Israel throughout this war,” Netanyahu said, adding he hoped that Trump’s return to office would restart progress toward normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia as a “natural expansion of the Abraham Accords.”
According to Netanyahu, Yahiya Sinwar, the deceased leader of Hamas, assumed that the war would end after Israel paused it for a week in November 2023, in the framework of a deal in which some 100 hostages were freed out of the 250 captured by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.
Sinwar “thought it was bravado on my part—that once I paused the war, I wouldn’t be able to resume it,” Netanyahu said. Sinwar was killed on Oct. 16 this year. The Journal‘s reporter noted that, based on the interview, the Israeli prime minister supports pausing but not ending the fighting with Hamas in exchange for a partial hostage deal. “I’m not going to agree to end the war before we remove Hamas,” Netanyahu said.
The U.S. also opposed “any move to take the fight to Hezbollah,” the Journal‘s Elliot Kaufman wrote in piece.
“I said we should do it in October,” Netanyahu said of the escalation in the war with Hezbollah. “One of the reasons was that October is one month before November,” he added in a reference to the U.S. presidential election.
Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of the northwestern Negev, in which it murdered some 1,200 people and abducted another 250, Hezbollah fired rockets daily into Israel.
On Sept. 17, 2024, Israel escalated the fight against Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing its top command and wiping out much of its ballistic capabilities with relatively low loss of civilian lives. Last month, Hezbollah accepted a ceasefire on terms it had previously rejected.
Iran has carried out two direct attacks on Israel with rockets during the war, and Israel’s second retaliatory response destroyed much of the Islamic Republic’s air defenses. Iran has not attacked directly since. Netanyahu declined to say whether Israel plans to use this weakness to strike Iran’s nuclear sites.
The regime of Bashar Assad in Syria, a key Iranian and Hezbollah ally, collapsed on Dec. 8.
“We knocked down Hezbollah, which was supposed to protect Iran. And Iran didn’t protect Hezbollah either. And neither of them protected Assad. So, we just split that whole axis right down the middle,” Netanyahu said. Iran “spent probably $30 billion in Syria, another $20 billion in Lebanon, God knows how much on Hamas. And it’s all gone down the tubes,” he said. “They have no supply line.”