Former Israeli prime minister calls Biden weapon halt threat ‘deeply misguided’
Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said President Biden’s threat to halt weapons to Israel is “deeply misguided.”
“Certainly, President Biden has always been a great friend to Israel, but I think that this decision is deeply misguided,” Bennett told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Thursday.
“What are we being told here,” he continued. “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.”
Bennett said Hamas is hiding behind civilians and that Biden threatening to stop sending weapons to Israel would be a “profound mistake,” because Israel has “really no choice” and they must “do what we got to do.”
His comments follow a Wednesday declaration from Biden, who said that the U.S. would stop supplying Israel with offensive weapons like bombs or artillery shells if Israeli forces launch an invasion on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of civilians have taken refuge.
“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they got after population centers,” Biden told Burnett.
Biden said he made it clear that if Israel goes into Rafah, he would not supply the weapons.
The White House has urged Israel to make a plan to evacuate the refugees before entering the city, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been adamant about his plans to destroy Hamas, whom he claims are hiding in Rafah.
Bennett said Israeli is “absolutely not” using weapons to target civilians in Gaza, but said “all wars” have “collateral damage.”
Burnett pressed the former prime minister on Israel’s supposed “stockpile” of weapons that could be used without U.S. assistance to enter Rafah, asking if that stockpile contained American weapons.
“I don’t know. I assume that some of them are,” he replied, adding that he’s not in government right now.
Bennett continued, saying he doesn’t know why Israel has wavered on entering Rafah, which he said should have been done roughly four months ago.
“We’re doing this way too late, but it’s better late than never,” he said.