Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to acknowledge he bears some responsibility for the failures that enabled Hamas’s cross-border invasion and onslaught of October 7, 2023, but claimed that “everyone” from the top to the bottom of the political, military, and security hierarchies bears responsibility as well, and the “real issue” is what has happened since that day and not what preceded it.

Asked during a wide-ranging interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” how it is that all those who were in charge of security during the attack have quit or been fired except him, Netanyahu claimed some departed because their terms were up, and only one or two “claimed they took responsibility, but it’s not clear what — what does that mean, you know? What is their responsibility?”

The remarks appeared in an off-mic section of the interview that wasn’t aired on Sunday, and only in CBS’s full transcript.

“Let’s look at the political echelon, military echelon, the security echelon. Let’s look down at everyone, and everybody bears some responsibility. Yeah, from the top, from the prime minister down,” he said, going on to repeat his proposal for a politically appointed commission of inquiry instead of an independent state commission of inquiry, the country’s highest form of inquiry, which he has refused to form.

Polls have consistently indicated a clear majority of Israelis support a state commission, and Netanyahu himself backed such an inquiry into the conduct of the previous government in 2022. But the current government has steadfastly refused to consider this, and has yet to okay any inquiry, over two-and-a-half years after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

“But I think the real issue is, okay, that’s up to October 7th. What about since October 7th?” he continued. “[It] was clearly my responsibility to get Israel out of this horrible noose of death that the Iranians put on us. And we did, systematically, very resolutely, go [to] each one of these seven fronts, one after the other, and roll back the tide of terror.”

Netanyahu has given periodic interviews to international media since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack, while largely restricting his interviews with Israeli outlets to those that are considered openly supportive of him.

According to the Kan public broadcaster, the “60 Minutes” interview was filmed at the Jerusalem home of Netanyahu’s billionaire friend and backer Simon Falic.

‘I don’t claim perfect foresight’

Asked about a growing perception of him as hungry for conflict, Netanyahu told CBS that until October 7, he was considered “perhaps the most restrained prime minister in Israel’s history,” and that this changed after October 7.

“I was conceived as being politically tough, but militarily very restrained,” he said of his more than a decade in power in which he had bucked frequent right-wing demands to declare full-on war on Hamas, and had cast such a war as unnecessary. Numerous reports and some top security officials have said publicly that Netanyahu and his government repeatedly rejected plans to kill senior Hamas leaders.

“[This] obviously changed on October the 7th because they were gonna annihilate us. I didn’t think it was just an attack by........

© The Times of Israel