A scathing response. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted on Saturday to comments made by Emmanuel Macron, who gave an interview to the BBC, broadcast on Friday evening, in which the French president "urges Israel to stop" the bombing killing civilians in Gaza. "The responsibility for any harm done to civilians lies with Hamas," Netanyahu said in a televised address Saturday from the Defense Headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding the remarks by French President Emmanuel Macron:
"The responsibility for any harm to civilians lies with Hamas - ISIS and not with Israel.
— Prime Minister of Israel (@IsraeliPM) November 10, 2023
Macron "made a serious mistake on a factual and moral level," the Israeli prime minister said, adding that "it is not Israel that is preventing the evacuation of civilians, but Hamas," the armed terror group that started the war with the October 7 massacres and uses civilians as "human shields."
"We must not forget that Israel entered the war because of the brutal murder of hundreds of Israelis by this terrorist organization and the taking hostage of more than 200 Israelis," Bibi stressed, who also recalled that Macron had done "good things," referring to his trip to the Jewish state and the dispatch of a "humanitarian ship."
A dry response
In his interview with the British television channel, Macron lamented the fact that babies, women and the elderly are being "bombed and killed." There is "no justification" and "no legitimacy for this. So we urge Israel to stop," he said. This "reaction in the fight against terrorism, because it is led by a democracy, must comply with the international rules of war and international humanitarian law," implored the French president on Friday, who unveiled this Saturday evening in our columns a letter to the French on anti-Semitism.
"This is a war that could not be more justified. You have to draw a moral line: you can't offer immunity to terrorists," Netanyahu replied. "We are doing everything we can to limit the civilian casualties that are not involved, but we will not give Hamas permission to kill our people without retaliation from us," the prime minister concluded, adding that he "does not need these moral lessons."
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Hamas' health ministry announced that 11,078 people, including 4,506 children, had been killed in Israeli shelling of the Gaza Strip since the start of the war. The Hamas attack killed about 1,200 people on the Israeli side, the majority of them civilians killed on October 7, and 42 soldiers have been killed in the Gaza Strip since Israeli ground operations began, according to official Israeli figures. The Israeli military estimates that some 240 people were taken hostage in the Gaza Strip during the Hamas attack.