Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar on Sunday said the October 7, 2023, massacre was “hatched” by Hamas during the term of the short-lived government led by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, which ended in late 2022.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in power when the invasion and massacre occurred, and in the months preceding it, and in fact has led Israel nearly uninterruptedly since 2009.

Zohar, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, acknowledged in a 103FM radio interview that the attack “happened on our watch.”

“But it was hatched during the previous watch of Bennett and Lapid as prime ministers,” he added. He claimed that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar planned the attack under the previous government “the moment he saw [their] weakness.”

“After we came into government, all these arguments began over the judicial reform, and a very big rift was created in the nation, and that may have also been a significant trigger for Sinwar to attack Israel,” Zohar said, referring to the coalition’s controversial judicial overhaul legislation, which sparked nationwide protests in the year leading up to the massacre.

Zohar also said that despite the rifts, after the Hamas attack took place Israelis from across the political spectrum arose and managed to “beat their enemies.”

A Hamas memo from 2022, during the 18 months when the Bennett-Lapid government was in power, reportedly detailed plans for the massacre.

However, from as early as 2018, Netanyahu was reportedly warned several times about Hamas’s plans to invade Israel.

Last week, Bennett and Lapid, who built a diverse, multi-party coalition after the 2021 election, formed a joint slate called Together in a bid to unseat Netanyahu at the next election, scheduled to be held by the end of October.

In response to Zohar’s........

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