The United Nations must do more to help Palestinians in Gaza who have fled IDF bombings by building tens of thousands of tents in safe zones, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday.
“I have not seen yet the effort that I’d like to see from the UN and the international agencies to build shelters there [in Gaza],” he said.
“Winter is coming and there is no reason not to erect tens of thousands of tents in the safe zone or next to the safe zone,” he said.
He spoke on the 49th day of the Gaza war, which was sparked by Hamas’s October 7 slaughter of over 1,200 mostly civilians and the seizure of some 240 hostages when it attacked southern Israel.
Israel’s military campaign to oust Hamas from Gaza has caused over 1.6 million Palestinians in Gaza out of a population of 2.7 million to flee to the southern part of the enclave, sandwiched between Israel and Egypt.
Netanyahu and UN at odds over IDF safe zones
Netanyahu and the UN have been at odds, as he has urged the UN to operate in safe zones the IDF has created for Palestinians in the south, while the UN has been loath to consider those area official havens.
“It’s shocking,” he said, that the UN doesn’t “enter the safe zones.”
Netanyahu held a joint meeting in Jerusalem with the Prime Ministers of Spain and Belgium, Pedro Sanchez and Alexander De Croo. He met separately with newly installed British Foreign Minister David Cameron.
In those meetings he made his case for Israel’s continued military campaign in Gaza to oust Hamas, particularly its entry into hospitals in the enclave where the terrorist group has infrastructure and arms.
“We face a peculiar kind of enemy, a particularly cruel and inhuman foe,” Netanyahu said, after he showed Sanchez and De Croo video footage from the October 7 attack, in which Hamas burned victims alive, raped, and dismembered them.
Hamas has asserted that over 14,000 Palestinians have been killed in war-related violence. The Palestinian Authority has accused Israel of genocide.
The international community, including Europe, has urged Israel to take steps to allow for more humanitarian aid to reach Gaza and to reduce the casualty count. It has also called for a pause in the war, if not a ceasefire.
Netanyahu told his Spanish and Belgian counterparts that Hamas is “genocidal.” Hamas is “not fighting for this or that territory; they’re fighting to eliminate the Jewish state in whatever boundary. They say so. Their charter says if you find a bush and a Jew is hiding behind it, kill the Jew. Kill all the Jews,” he said.
Israel first, you next, says Netanyahu
But Israel and the Jews are not their only targets, he charged.
“They’re part of an axis of terrorism: Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis” that hates “our free civilization. They want to bury it. They have an ideology that is mad.”
He urged the European leaders not to give in to the moral relativeness that draws an equivalence between Hamas and Israel and that attempts to justify the terrorist group’s actions on October 7.
“I don’t give in to relative moralism that says…they can do these horrible things to women. They can do these horrible things to human beings,” he told the Belgian and Spanish premiers. “Your moral values do not stand up, if you’re not willing to fight for them.”
Netanyahu also warned of the danger of making it illegal to go after terrorist groups such as Hamas, that hide among civilian populations, as he explained that the high death toll in Gaza was directly related to Hamas’s willingness to sacrifice its own people.
“They deliberately implant themselves in hospitals, in schools, in residential areas, in UN facilities. They fire their rockets from there. Thousands of them,” Netanyahu said.
Democratic countries like Israel do not target civilians, he said. “But if we, the democracies, accept, say that under no circumstances should we go in because civilians tragically get killed, then we lost,” he said.
This includes Europe, he said. “This will spread. You will see it. Very soon. Because the Axis of Terror is not going to stop. If they can emerge victorious here, they intend to bring down the Middle East, and next, they’ll go to Europe. After that, they’ll go elsewhere.”
This is not an exaggeration, he said, as he called on them to rise up to this challenge by supporting Israel.
Netanyahu compares fight against Hamas to fight against Hitler
“This is where the pivot of history now is going to be decided. Do we stop them there? Or do they come to you?” Netanyahu asked.
He drew an analogy with Nazi Germany, as he asked whether the Allies could have destroyed Hitler if they had held their fire to avoid hitting civilians.
“I don’t know what history would have been like if we had demonstrations and protests in the West against the Allies for incurring civilian, German civilian casualties. I know history would have been very different,” he said.
The Western world must stop holding Israel to an impossible standard that applies to no one else as it fights terrorism, Netanyahu stated.
“We seek to minimize civilian casualties, and Hamas seeks to maximize it. And I would strongly urge you to make that distinction, not merely because it’s right and just, but because your very societies are on the line. You’re next,” he said.
Cameron, whose country has strongly supported Israel, took the time to travel to Kibbutz Be’eri together with Foreign Minister Eli Cohen. Hamas massacred that community on October 7, murdering some 100 of its members.
“I won’t forget what I saw. It makes a very deep impression,” Cameron told President Isaac Herzog.
“You have our support. We stand with the people of Israel at this difficult time,” as he noted that some of the fatalities and those taken hostage had British citizenship.
But he also spoke of the importance of pausing the war to provide humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people, explaining that his country wants to help with that effort.
“Those people need food, they need water, they need medicine. ..I think it is vitally important that we demonstrate to the Palestinian people, to the world, that we want to help.”