Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday compared demonstrations in Israel calling for a deal to free the hostages held in the Gaza Strip to anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protests that have rocked US college campuses in recent months.
Neither one has the support of the broad public, the premier asserted.
Netanyahu spoke to CNBC about the ongoing war against Palestinian terror group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which began when Hamas led a devastating attack on Israel during which terrorists killed some 1,200 people and abducted 252. Israel has set freeing the hostages from Gaza as a key goal of its military campaign.
Asked if he still feels he has a mandate from the Israeli population amid the mass protests calling for a deal with Hamas to free the hostages, Netanyahu said the weekly rallies do not reflect the “vast support” that his government has from the public.
“Everybody is focused on these protests, which are financed and organized and so on, but they don’t reflect the majority of the people any more than the mobocracies in American campuses, these protesters, these mobs — do they reflect the majority of the American people?”
“The majority of the people here support a victory,” Netanyahu asserted and reiterated that Israel “cannot agree” to a deal that would leave Hamas as the ruling power in Gaza.
Israel and Hamas have been holding indirect negotiations for months aimed at reaching a deal that would free hostages and temporarily halt the fighting that has been raging in Gaza since the October 7 assault by the terror group on southern Israel.
Israel responded with a military campaign to destroy Hamas, topple its regime, and free the hostages, of whom 128 remain in captivity, some believed no longer alive.
Talks have continued for months without a decisive breakthrough. Israel has said it is determined to eliminate Hamas, while Hamas says it wants a permanent ceasefire and a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The Biden administration has said Hamas is the party standing in the way of a deal.
Recent weeks have seen pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel encampments spread across US colleges, where they have disrupted activities amid what some Jewish students say is also open antisemitism making them feel unsafe. In many cases, there have been violent clashes with police after demonstrators refused to disperse and college authorities then called in officers to clear the encampments. Around 2,000 arrests have been made.
The failure of the hostage-truce negotiations to date has galvanized many relatives of those kidnapped, some of whom have joined anti-government protesters in accusing the government of sabotaging the chances for an agreement in order to push ahead with an invasion of Rafah, which is thought to be Hamas’s last major stronghold but is also home to over a million Gazans who have fled the fighting in other parts of the Strip.
Weekly Saturday night rallies, focused in Tel Aviv, draw tens of thousands of participants. Though protesters have urged agreeing to a deal, even with reported terms that would see Israel release hundreds or even thousands of the Palestinian security prisoners it holds, they have not suggested a formula of agreeing to all Hamas demands, no matter what, in return for the freeing the hostages.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, the main group representing families of the kidnapped, said last week that it had appealed to several countries to pressure Israel for an agreement.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 35,000 people in the Strip have been killed in the fighting so far, a toll that cannot be independently verified. It also includes some 15,000 terror operatives Israel says it has killed in battle. Israel also says it killed some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.