Israel’s Netanyahu Increasingly Under Fire in the United States
From October 7 "bombshell," to policy on the West Bank, prime minister's actions condemned
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a growing negative drumbeat in the United States as a result of a “bombshell” new report about the October 7 Hamas attacks, and more.
Criticism of Netanyahu’s actions leading up to those attacks — which killed more than 1,200 Israelis — is growing louder.
The New York Times published a report Friday, which CNN host Dana Bash called a “bombshell,” as she interviewed the two reporters behind the piece, which found that Netanyahu's government knew of Hamas's plans for October 7 more than a year before it happened, but dismissed their potential.
And with the temporary pause in hostilities in Gaza now history and Israel resuming it's operations in retaliation for the attacks, Netanyahu’s wider policies towards the Palestinians are being condemned, as well.
Officials within the right-wing Netanyahu government ahad an approximately 40-page document which Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” which outlined point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to deaths of about 1,200 people, according to the Times’ reporting.
“This document code-named Jericho Wall was not neglected, on the contrary. Massive resources and efforts were put into the operation to get it,” reporter Ronen Bergman said in the interview with CNN. “And then it was sent to the series of Israeli intelligence defense establishment, and to many analysts that work in data coming from Hamas from the overall efforts of Israeli intelligence to get as much as possible from Hamas from the Gaza Strip.
“This war plan, this attack plan is very sophisticated. I don’t remember any document that I’ve read that has so much secrets on Israeli preparation for war, the fortification of the wall, the cameras, the automatic machine guns that was not written by Israeli defense establishment, at least suggest that some parts of that plan coming not from open sources,” Bergman added. “But besides that, Israeli intelligence saw this document, except for one analyst that thought differently. But Israeli intelligence, all the analysts that saw this document said, ‘This is a roadmap. This is an aspiration. This is something they want to be but they’re not now, they don’t have the capacity or the sophistication to execute such a massive invasion into Israel.’”
In addition to that intelligence failure, Netanyahu faces condemnation over his treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, where Israelis have been settling and displacing Palestinians.
“Even strong supporters of Israel in the United States, and I put myself right up there, we're not blind,” Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC's Morning Joe, said Friday, on-camera. “We can watch the television. We can see what's happening in the West Bank. The West Bank is becoming a more chaotic by the day.
“What does that mean? It means we get further away from the two-state solution which Netanyahu has fought against for over a decade now,” added Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida. “That means there's a possibility — if you're a supporter, strong supporter of Israel — that you're now looking at a two-front war, possibly a three-front war, when the [Israel Defense Forces] has their hands full with Gaza.”
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