The New York Times on Sunday dismissed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s denial of a July 11 report claiming that he prolonged the war against Hamas in order to stay in power, declaring the response “does not refute the facts.”
According to the lengthy Times report, published Friday, Netanyahu deliberately extended the war in Gaza against Hamas to serve his own political goals of rehabilitating his domestic image and staying in power.
Among the actions listed in the report were Netanyahu’s shelving of a Gaza truce deal that would have secured the release of at least 30 hostages, due to a threat by far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to bring down the government. He also allegedly derailed a White House effort to secure Israeli-Saudi normalization that was conditional on ending the Gaza war amid opposition by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
In a statement released Friday night, then deleted without explanation and rereleased after Shabbat, the Prime Minister’s Office claimed that the Times coverage “defames Israel, its brave people and soldiers, and its prime minister,” while praising Netanyahu’s decisions post-October 7 as leading to the “greatest military comebacks in history.”
In its Sunday response, The Times stated that its investigation drew “on dozens of government records and military documents and interviews with more than 110 officials in Israel, the US, and across the Arab world.”
“Our role as independent journalists is to report and disclose information vital to the public interest, and to hold leaders to account regardless of party. The statement from the Prime Minister’s office does not refute the facts of that reporting. What the Times investigation shows in detail is how prolonging the Gaza war helped Mr. Netanyahu stay in power,” the paper asserted.
In its report, the Times said Netanyahu’s office “declined several requests for interviews and did not respond to a detailed list of the findings” from the article.
According to the report, the Gaza truce proposal that Netanyahu scuttled in April last year would have created a window to end the war permanently and release the remaining hostages, similar to the deal currently under discussion in Doha.
Moving forward with the deal would have raised the chances for a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia, whose leadership had been secretly signaling its willingness to accelerate peace talks with Israel if the Gaza war ended, the report said.
The Times also touched on Netanyahu’s troubled relationships with top security officials, stating that he repeatedly dismissed their assessments that growing internal rifts stemming from his government’s controversial judicial overhaul were being viewed by Israel’s adversaries as an invitation to attack in the lead-up to the Hamas onslaught on October 7, 2023.
During the war, Netanyahu’s mistrust of security officials grew to the point that he had generals patted down before meeting with him to make sure they weren’t recording the conversations, according to the report.
Palestinian terror groups are still holding 49 of the hostages who were abducted from southern Israel on October 7, when Hamas-led terrorists burst into the country, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and triggering the war. Hamas is also holding the body of an IDF soldier killed in Gaza in 2014.
Only 20 of the hostages are believed to be alive, Israeli officials have said.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.