Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara Netanyahu, paid a condolence visit to the family of Dvir Sorek in Ofra Tuesday.
Prime Minister Netanyahu said, "We have now come out of the Sorek family, the family of Rabbi Herling, who has now lost a grandson. Rabbi Herling's last family event was Dvir's Brit. Two months after the Brit, Rabbi Herling was murdered. Dvir did not get to know Rabbi Herling, who was a Holocaust survivor and a fighter. He fought until the last moment."
"They raised an exemplary family. We saw the children, the love between them, the love of Israel and the love of the person who drowned them," said Netanyahu. "This is where this horrible and horrific disaster happened. We have seen this innocent boy, who was completely pure, so brutally murdered."
Yesterday I was at the president's house with the Shin Bet fighters. They acted quickly with the other security forces and found the murderers," the prime minister added. "What I saw here, in this house, is first and foremost the determination to hold on to our country without reservation. It is also our determination to fight our enemies. We reach those who seek our lives, here and on every front. We are determined to protect our country - these are not mere words, these are words of truth - until our enemies realize that we cannot be uprooted from anywhere in Palestine, even from this place. We will continue to take root and continue to fight, as needed, and unfortunately we must.
"I also said that the Land of Israel is in agony. We need to see this family, its mental strengths, to understand how great their spiritual charge is, of our people, and therefore we will never be able to," Netanyahu noted.
The prime minister also said, "I told the family that the murder of Dvir is indicative of the large-scale murder they would inflict on each of us if they could. The reason they don't do it is not because the incitement and hateful rhetoric isn't pervasive, it's simply because they can't. We're preventing them from doing this, and we are reaching them ... We will continue to fight them. I have defined them as 'walking animals, but I think that I did an injustice to animals."
The prime minister's wife noted, "It is painful to see this circle, 19 years after [Rabbi Herling's murder], and to know that his grandfather also fought the death of heroes when he was attacked by murderers, and to know that this has not stopped: those who seek our lives have not stopped."
"But we here in our country are defending ourselves - we are not in the pits of death. Dvir's grandfather went through the Holocaust, and all our people and families went through it. Then we were slaughtered and defenseless - today we defend ourselves. Dvir was a soldier, right at the beginning of his service, but he had a great poetic soul. It hurts the heart," Sara Netanyahu added.