Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett ripped President Joe Biden on Thursday for threatening to withhold military aid to Israel if the country invades Rafah to destroy the Hamas stronghold.
Bennett made the remarks on CNN during an interview with Erin Burnett while talking about remarks made to her during a separate interview that aired yesterday.
“I think this decision is deeply misguided,” Bennett said. “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.”
“Now, talking about civilians, if Hamas is granted immunity because it hides behind civilians, that’s not only a problem with Hamas,” he continued. “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.”
Bennett also called out Biden for claiming that Israel was targeting civilian population centers while not mentioning that the country goes to great lengths to warn civilians that they need to leave and that Hamas hides behind civilians.
“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,” he said. “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.”
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“In Afghanistan, in Iraq, it was one to nine. For every terrorist you killed, there were six, seven, eight, nine civilians,” he continued. “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.”
WATCH:
“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