A former prime minister of Israel has accused Benjamin Netanyahu of needlessly prolonging the Gaza offensive and blocking the path to peace while kidnapped hostages are left to die.
In a scathing condemnation, Ehud Olmert charged that Mr Netanyahu’s “arrogance” and “manipulation” had led to catastrophic security failures, allowing the Hamas attack which triggered the current conflict.
He also warned that right-wing “messianics and extremists” brought into Israel’s governing coalition by the prime minister, are blocking the vital need for a settlement and have plans to cleanse Palestinians from their vision of a “Greater Israel”.
Mr Olmert’s strident criticism came as Mr Netanyahu snubbed the latest international attempt at a ceasefire, declaring that the war will continue until complete victory. Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, left his fifth visit to the Middle East in the last four months with relations between the Israeli government and Washington reportedly at their worst since the conflict began.
The archive link was to archive.today, though, which while they’re generally better than archive.org at circumventing paywalls they’re quite dodgy and poison DNS from Cloudfire and Quad9.