Netanyahu says Israel’s strikes on Iran destroyed ‘industrial factories of death’
Israel hit key Iranian sites hard in its airstrikes on Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during a fiery address on Monday at the opening of the Knesset winter legislative session.
“We severely damaged Iran’s defense systems and its ability to export missiles,” Netanyahu said in a speech to the Knesset plenum. “These were not [basic tools] we were attacking. These are industrial factories of death and we struck them hard.”
Netanyahu obliquely pushed back on reports that the White House had convinced him to scale back the response to Iran’s October 1 ballistic missile attack, emphasizing that “we make decisions ourselves according to our interests and considerations.”
Seemingly responding to recent criticism that the ongoing war lacks clear strategic aims, the prime minister said Israel’s goals against Iran and its proxies are clear: “Our long-term strategy is to dismantle the axis of evil, to cut off its arms in the south and in the north, to exact a heavy price from Iran and its proxies and to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons.”
The IDF carried out a wave of strikes against targets in Iran early Saturday morning, almost four weeks after the Islamic Republic’s massive ballistic missile barrage on the country. The operation, hitting targets some 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) away, was unprecedented in terms of its scale and duration, as well as Israel’s immediate acknowledgment of responsibility.
The strikes came after weeks of Israel being urged to temper its response to the Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israel on October 1, which came days after Israel killed Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah. Satellite imagery of Iran has shown damage to a number of military sites, though Iranian leaders have sought to downplay the effects.
Netanyahu said Monday that Israel is the one obstacle keeping Iran from controlling the Middle East and threatening the rest of the world.
“The fanatical axis of evil led by Iran threatens to destroy our country and trap other countries in its net, and to threaten the West first of all. Iran is working for a stockpile of nuclear bombs and will be able to threaten the entire world whenever it wants,” he said.
According to Iran’s thinking, he argued, “if Israel falls, the entire Middle East will fall into its hands, but we will not fall. We will win and the whole world will be a better place.”
Turning to the fighting in Gaza and Lebanon, Netanyahu said that the “day after” the war, “Hamas will no longer rule Gaza and Hezbollah will not sit on our northern border.”
He also pledged that he will continue to make peace with Arab countries, without mentioning Saudi Arabia by name.
The prime minister also promised to bring all the hostages home, and to achieve the war aims he laid out at the beginning of the war: “Total victory is an orderly and consistent work plan that we fulfill step by step,” he insisted.
Source » timesofisrael.com
