Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected calls for an independent probe into his country’s security failures that led to Hamas’s attack on the territory on October 7.
“First, I want to defeat Hamas,” Netanyahu told Israeli lawmakers.
Netanyahu’s spokesman said the Israeli prime minister was not trying to avoid the investigation but that the government was fully focused on winning this war first.
“What the public wants us to do now, they don’t want us to conduct a dramatic internal investigation while our hostages are still being held, and so many soldiers have given their lives to protect the country,” the spokesman said.
“Of course there will be an investigation, but right now we are focused on winning this war,” he said.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant last week called for the creation of a state commission of inquiry into the Oct. 7 attacks.
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“This should examine all of us, the decision-makers and professionals, the government, the military and the security services, this government and the governments over the last decade that led to the events of October 7,” Gallant said at a military graduation ceremony.
A video of the three-hour meeting in the prime minister’s office, described by Israeli media as tense, was broadcast on television shortly afterward, showing a series of confrontations between the bereaved families and the prime minister, who rejected their demands for peace and an apology for his role in the security failures.
Netanyahu appeared shocked as the families described how their daughters had repeatedly warned of an attack, despite numerous reports in the months since Oct. 7 describing how the scouts were ignored when they tried to alert their commanders to the risk.
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One of the participants in the meeting told Netanyahu that his daughter had just finished her job training. She had started her duty as an observation soldier a week earlier. She came home and told him that there was going to be an invasion.
“Ma’am, there will be an invasion,” he said.
The meeting marked the highest-level acknowledgement of the Israeli military’s failure to listen to a reconnaissance unit in Nahal Oz, where dozens of soldiers were killed and others taken hostage on October 7, part of an unprecedented assault by Hamas and other militants on the towns.
Read also: Senior Hamas Official Killed in Israeli Airstrike on Gaza School
Human Rights Watch accused Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, and at least four other Palestinian armed groups of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during the offensive, which killed nearly 1,200 people and took 250 hostages.
In its new report, the human rights group points to a widespread pattern of attacks on civilians, which it says constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, hostage-taking and other grave violations.
Israel’s air and ground campaign targeting Gaza in recent months has killed more than 38,000 people and thousands more are believed to be buried under the rubble.
Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected calls for an investigation into military and security failures that preceded the Hamas-led offensive, despite a series of resignations and apologies from top Israeli security officials.
Last week, a prominent member of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency known only by the initials “Aleph” resigned and reportedly said in his farewell speech that he was leaving amid deep disappointment that his department had failed to prevent the attack.
The Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, resigned in April, making him the highest-ranking official to resign over the attack.
“The intelligence division under my command did not fulfill the tasks assigned to it,” he wrote in his resignation letter.
Despite protests calling for him to resign, as well as demands from various sections of Israeli society that he apologize for the security failures of October 7, Netanyahu has vehemently refused.
“The prime minister was very frank about the failures that led to October 7,” said David Mencer, Netanyahu’s spokesman, when asked why the prime minister refused to apologize.
“Israel is a democracy and in the past has always done very broad investigations, open-ended investigations into why these things happened. I think there is no doubt that there will be one of those open-ended investigations. But the prime minister believes that this should happen after the war is won,” he concluded. (The Guardian/Z-3)
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