Statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
[translated from Hebrew]:
โ"Dear citizens of Israel,
โFor decades, I have been fighting against Iranโs efforts to arm itself with nuclear weapons. I can define it as my lifeโs mission. I have met this challenge to this day, and I will continue to meet it in the future. With an agreement, without an agreement โ Iran will not have nuclear weapons. Not today, and not tomorrow. As long as I am Prime Minister of Israel โ this will not happen.
โI hear people asking: What have we achieved? And my response to them is: "What have we achieved"?! We have fended off an immediate threat of annihilation. Together with our American friends, we launched the largest offensive air operation in Israelโs history. We neutralized nuclear scientists, decapitated the leaders of the terror regime, pulverized nuclear facilities, destroyed missiles and the vast majority of the factories that produce them, struck countless military industries and infrastructures, destroyed their navy, their air force, neutralized Basij commanders who massacred the Iranian people, and caused enormous damage. We estimate it in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and some even estimate it to be closer to a trillion dollars โ enormous damage to the economy of Iran that took them decades to build.
โBut here is the most important thing: we saved the State of Israel from the threat of nuclear annihilation. Because, it is crucial to understand, Iran was racing toward a nuclear weapon just before Operation Rising Lion; it was racing toward a nuclear weapon and racing to bury its missile and nuclear industry deep underground.
โIf we had not acted at the time we did, and with the overwhelming force with which we did โ both in Operation Rising Lion and later in Operation Roaring Lion, in historic cooperation with President Trump and the American military โ if we had not acted in this way, Iran would already have atomic bombs. And what does that mean? It means that millions of Israeli citizens, you who are listening to me now, you would all have been in terrible danger of mass death. All of us would have been in that danger. And this danger, of the elimination of Israelโs population, we have fended off for years to come. That is what we have achieved โ we saved the State of Israel from annihilation.
โBut I tell you, citizens of Israel, the struggle is not over and done. We will need to maintain our vigilance, remain strong and determined to defend ourselves as required. This is true not only vis-ร -vis Iran. This is also true vis-ร -vis Iranโs terror proxies, which we have hit in an unprecedented manner. We did it in Gaza, we did it in Lebanon, in Syria, in Yemen, we did it in the refugee camps in Judea and Samaria โ we did it everywhere.
โWe eliminated Deif, Haniyeh, and Sinwar, along with many of Hamas's leaders. Actually, almost everyone who was there during the horrific massacre; I think there is one more left, he too will be eliminated. We destroyed thousands of terrorists and countless terror infrastructures. We returned all our hostages from Gaza, down to the very last one. No one believed we would do that. I did.
I was told: Prime Minister, we must give up, don't enter Rafah, end the war โ we will bring the hostages and we will frame our exit from Gaza as a victory. I did not accept this nonsense. We entered Rafah, we entered Gaza City, contrary to the opinions of many โ and we returned all the hostages, to the last one. And not only that, we exploded the pagers, we eliminated the arch-enemy Nasrallah, we prevented the invasion of the Radwan Force into the Galilee, we destroyed the vast majority of the 150,000 rockets and missiles that Nasrallah built in order to devastate the cities of Israel.โ