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.
- I like that you included an archive link and media bias fact check link OP. Obviously, the latter isn’t without controversy, but it’s better than nothing.
- It’s important that criticism is coming from a former Israeli PM and Biden. I know there are a lot of the people who are very critical of both or likely don’t think they’re going far enough, but because the former is Israeli and the latter has been vocal in his support of Israel, it’s far harder for Israel’s far right government and their supporters to discount that criticism. This is far more damaging than any protest march could be, especially if those participating in that martch have always been critical of Israel or can be painted as making excuses for Hamas or Iran.
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Olmert said: “Israel has received huge support from the West, from Rishi Sunak in Britain, from Olaf Scholz in Germany, Emmanuel Macron in France and, of course, from Joe Biden, who I got to know well.
However, he later became the chief architect of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and came close to reaching an agreement on a two-state solution with Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas before it fell apart at the last.
He was also responsible, Mr Olmert added, for freeing more than 1,000 Hamas prisoners, including Yahya Sinwar, who went on to become the group’s head in Gaza, in exchange for Gilad Shalit, a kidnapped Israeli soldier.
For these people in Netanyahu’s government, messianics and extremists, Gaza is just a preliminary stage of a bigger plan, to get rid of Palestinians from the West Bank and annex it,” said Mr Olmert.
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