Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu strongly criticized Prime Minister Yair Lapid and claimed that his signing of the maritime border agreement with Lebanon constitutes a "surrender to Hezbollah."
"For more than a decade, the governments under my leadership did not give in to Nasrallah's threats - and we did not suffer a war. Until Lapid arrived. Within three months, Lapid completely surrendered to all of Hezbollah's demands. On the day Lapid entered the Prime Minister's office, Nasrallah launched drones into a gas rig in our territory - something which 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," Netanyahu said.
He added that "Lapid, who opposed the gas outline that my friends and I brought for the benefit of the citizens of Israel - an outline that turned Israel into a world gas power - is now in a hurry to get the gas out of the water in favor of Hezbollah. And how is Lapid trying to justify the surrender? He says it is required in order to get the gas out of Karish. I would like to remind Lapid that the Karish reservoir is deep within our territory, that the development work there began five years ago, and that we never dreamed of asking Nasrallah for permission 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, this is a historical surrender - a liquidation sale of Lapid."
According to him, "Whoever 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 mass 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 brought about the quietest security decade in Israel's history."