Netanyahu Pressed Hard By Australian Reporter On ‘So Many’ Civilian Deaths In Gaza: ‘Are You Inflicting Collective Punishment?’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took questions from the international press on Monday and was asked directly if he was “inflicting collective punishment” on the people of Gaza.
“Mr. Prime Minister, Chris Reason from Channel 7 Australia. I want to ask a question from my country and the people in my country are looking at this and wondering, they agree with you, they want you to chase down Hamas and terrorism, destroy terrorism in this region, etc,” Reason began, adding:
But people can’t understand why so many people, civilians have to die in this process. You argue that Hamas is putting them up as human shields. Is that a good enough excuse? Are you inflicting here collective punishment on the people of Palestine?
“Not a single civilian has to die. Hamas merely has to let them go to the safe zone that we created in southeastern Gaza Strip. There’s a safe zone there,” Netanyahu replied, adding:
Not a single civilian has to die. But Hamas is preventing them from leaving. Keeping them in the areas of conflict. So I think that you should direct your questions to Hamas. But I can tell you one thing. We’re going out of our way to prevent civilian casualties, not only by asking civilians to move, calling them to move, arranging a place for them to be, which is safe. Also putting in a humanitarian support, providing them with the means, with food, with water, with medicine and so on.
I think that this question should be placed on Hamas, and the more it’s placed on Israel, the more you’re going to see this repeated again and again and again. So other groups, other criminal states, other criminal organizations will use civilians as human shields. We cannot give immunity to these terrorists. We cannot give immunity to these savages. We have to do everything we can to minimize civilian casualties.
But we cannot give up the fight, because then I think this will have disastrous consequences, not only for the future of my country, but for the future of your country, your countries. This is a battle of civilization against barbarians. The barbarians will do something that civilized countries will never do, and civilized countries will make every effort to prevent this. And I’ll give you one example, and I’ll end with that, because I have to go to manage this war and lead it.
In 1944, the Royal Air Force bombed the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen. It’s a perfectly legitimate target, but the British pilots missed. And instead of the Gestapo headquarters, they hit a children’s hospital nearby. And I think 84 children were hardly burned to death. That is not a war crime. That is not something you blamed Britain for doing.
That was a legitimate act of war with tragic consequences that accompany such legitimate actions. And you didn’t tell the allies, ‘Don’t stamp out Nazism,’ because of such tragic consequences. They went to the end because they knew that the future of our civilization was at stake.
“Well, I’m telling you right now that the future of our civilization is at stake. We have to win this war. We’ll do it by minimizing civilian casualties and may we succeed. Thank you,” Netanyahu concluded.
MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing then summed up the presser, saying, “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu under fire. And you heard it in the question. His approval ratings are dropping among the people of Israel. He has been in a back and forth between the military and security forces after he put out a tweet suggesting that they didn’t give him the information that Hamas was going to launch an attack and not accepting responsibility. And even though he withdrew that posting on X, he did not accept responsibility.”
Watch the full clip above via MSNBC.
