Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu charged that his predecessor Naftali Bennett acted with “grave irresponsibility” for admitting that Israel directly attacked a military target in Iran last year.
"He has no authority to make those claims," Netanyahu said on Saturday night, explaining that only a sitting Prime Minister is tasked with making such claims.
Netanyahu spoke in response to an opinion piece Bennett published in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday in which he stated that the IDF had “destroyed a UAV based on Iranian soil” after it had launched two failed UAV attacks on Israel in February 2022.
Attempted terror
“Iran’s terror unit attempted to kill Israeli tourists in Turkey and failed. Shortly thereafter, the commander of that very unit was assassinated in the center of Tehran,” Bennett wrote, hinting that Israel was behind that killing.
In that piece, Bennett called on Israel and the United States to directly attack the Islamic Republic, as he criticized Netanyahu’s policies on Iran while buttressing his own.
Netanyahu also has a history of publicizing information about veiled Israeli regional attacks. When he was opposition leader in 2007, he revealed that Israel had struck the site of a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria.
In speaking with reporters on Saturday night, Netanyahu said, that his 2007 utterance which was done in the context of a live interview was a mistake but had been intended as a compliment to the then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Bennett’s admission, Netanyahu said, was done in a written article and was thus deliberate and well thought out.