In bellicose Memorial Day speeches, leaders vow to keep fighting; Netanyahu heckled |
Israel’s leaders on Tuesday peppered their Memorial Day speeches with bellicose rhetoric amid the fragile ceasefire in Lebanon and Iran, promising to pursue and kill the country’s adversaries.
In an incident illustrating the tense national mood, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was heckled at an official state memorial ceremony, typically a decorous event. It was one of multiple times protesters confronted officials at ceremonies across the country.
The day’s commemorations were punctuated by a two-minute siren that rang out across the country at 11 a.m., during which Israelis stood silently in memory of the fallen.
Netanyahu, speaking Tuesday at the state ceremony at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, said for the second time that Iran wanted to perpetrate another Holocaust against the Jews, but the US and Israel stopped it.
“The ayatollah regime in Iran planned another Holocaust,” the premier said. “It sought to destroy us with nuclear weapons and thousands of ballistic missiles. Had we not acted decisively, the names Natanz, Fordo, and Isfahan might have joined Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka,” referring first to Iranian nuclear sites, then to Nazi death camps.
Netanyahu said that danger was averted “because together with our great ally, the United States, we dismantled that machinery of destruction in advance. We removed an immediate existential threat.”
“That is the essence of this campaign,” he continued, “to ensure that the lifeline of the Jewish people is never cut.”
In a speech on Monday ushering in Memorial Day, Netanyahu said regarding Iran, “We have not yet finished the work.”
Defense Minister Israel Katz, also speaking at Mount Herzl, vowed that Israel would kill Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem. He blamed the Iran-backed terror group’s former leader, Hassan Nasrallah, for the destruction in Lebanon that has ensued from the Israel-Hezbollah conflicts of recent years.
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I ordered the IDF to act with strength, even during the ceasefire, in order to defend our soldiers in Lebanon against every threat,” he said.
“Nasrallah destroyed the Shiite community in Lebanon, and Naim Qassem will destroy it and pay with the loss of homes and territory — just like Hamas did in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza — until he also pays with the loss of his head,” Katz vowed.
Protesters disrupt PM, cabinet ministers
Addressing the day more generally on Tuesday, Netanyahu spoke at Mount Herzl about his slain brother, noting it had been fifty years since Yoni Netanyahu was killed in battle during the rescue of Israeli and Jewish hostages from a hijacked plane in Entebbe, Uganda, in July 1976.
“The moment I informed my parents of the bitter news of Yoni’s death was the hardest moment of my life. Since then, fifty years have passed, and there is not a day I don’t think of you, Yoni,” the prime minister said.
Tuesday’s ceremony marked Israel’s third Memorial Day since the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, which triggered the war........