Former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu this evening (Tuesday) sharply attacks Yair Lapid and claims that his signing of the maritime border agreement with Lebanon is a “surrender to Hezbollah”.
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“For more than a decade, the governments under my leadership did not give in to Nasrallah’s threats – and we did not accept a war,” Netanyahu said. “Until the torch arrived. Within three months, Lapid completely surrendered to all of Hezbollah’s demands. On the day Lapid entered the Prime Minister’s office, Nasrallah sent drones to a gas rig in our territory – something he did not dare to do under the governments headed by me. He threatened Lapid: ‘By force of arms I will force Israel to surrender in negotiations.’ Lapid was frightened – and surrendered.”
He added: “Lapid, who opposed the gas plan that my friends and I brought for the benefit of the citizens of Israel – a plan that turned Israel into a world gas power – is now rushing to take the gas out of the water in favor of Hezbollah. And how does Lapid try to justify the surrender? He says that it is required in order to get the gas out of ‘Shark’.
“I want to remind Lapid that the ‘Sharish’ reservoir is deep within our territory, that the development work there started 5 years ago, and that we never dreamed of asking permission from Nasrallah to operate it. As David Friedman, the former US ambassador who dealt with the issue, said: ‘Lebanon received 100%, Israel received 0’. he was right. This is not a historical agreement, it is a historical surrender – liquidation sale of Lapid”.
According to him, “He who surrenders to Hezbollah like this cannot be prime minister. He will not be able to deal with Iran’s race for nuclear weapons, and with the destabilization of the world order following the crisis in Ukraine. Faced with the multitude of threats that Israel faces, the new equation created by Lapid, according to which threats are met with surrender, is a strategic danger to Israel’s security. My friends and I acted differently. We did not give in to threats, we removed the gas from the sea, and we brought about the quietest security decade in Israel’s history.”
“We will return to Israel a strong, experienced and responsible leadership, which will restore deterrence to Israel, and I emphasize without being dragged into unnecessary adventures. We will handle this matter with the same responsibility and the same determination, as we handled other bad agreements we inherited from the leftist governments in the past. In this tumultuous time, Israel cannot afford an amateurish and weak prime minister. Once was enough for us.”