Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke today (Monday) at the “Fifty States - One Israel” event at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the largest delegation of American legislators to ever visit Israel.
"Can I ask a question? How many of you are visiting Israel for the first time?" he asked the 250 lawmakers from 50 states. "How many have been here before? Wow, two."
"Well, welcome to all of you. It's very good to see you here with Foreign Minister Saar and Deputy Minister Sharren Haskel and our Ambassador to Washington, Yechiel. Stand up. Look at this man. Look at this man. Look at him. He, Yechiel, represents the greatest military comeback in recent history," he stated.
Netanyahu noted: "On October 7th, we were attacked with no provocation by the Hamas monsters. They murdered 1,200 of our citizens. They burnt babies alive. They raped and then murdered women. They beheaded men. They took 250-some hostages, grandmothers, grandchildren, Holocaust survivors, to the dungeons of Gaza."
"I think a lot of people thought that we were on the ropes or perhaps flat on the ground and we didn't have a chance of coming back. A day later, on October 8th, Hezbollah joined the fray. They started rocketing our cities. Again, no provocation," he said.
"I said on that day that we will change the face of the Middle East. I said that because it was clear to me from day one that we weren't just fighting Hamas. We were fighting the Iran axis that consisted of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the three H's, and a few others in between. And while we would start with Hamas, we'd have to eventually reach the patron and in one ear or the other, all the elements of this terror axis," he added. "This is what we proceeded to do. First, by striking hard at Hamas. Then when their main forces, main organized military forces, were obliterated, we went to the north. I hope none of you have beepers. And proceeded to take out Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah, who was, in effect, the axis of the axis. He actually held this axis together. And once he was gone, the Assad, the murderous Assad regime in Syria, collapsed."
"Because during the Syrian Civil War, it wasn't the Syrian army that fought Assad's enemies. It was, invariably, when the battle didn't go well, Nasrallah would send him thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of Hezbollah troops to save his regime. Now, Nasrallah was gone, Hezbollah was crippled, so Assad fell. And once he fell, the land route that connected this axis from Tehran to the sea, Lebanon was gone," Netanyahu said.
"And now, what happened was that the death noose that Hamas wanted to… that Iran wanted to put, place around our necks, was gone. That was one of their vehicles to annihilate Israel. Remember, they chanted 'Death to America, death to Israel.' To achieve death to America, they have to achieve first death to Israel, because we are America's frontline here. And the only force in the Middle East that was challenging, forcibly challenging, and fighting them in their quest for domination and subordination and annihilation, but ultimately, they were geared to America," he added.
He continued: "So, their goal was to destroy Israel, so what did they do? They began to race to the bomb. They already had enough enriched uranium, but you need the weapon around that uranium ball. And so, they began to work secretly to activate their weaponization team, it's called, in jargon, okay? We knew that if we didn't act within a year, they'd have one atomic bomb, possibly two. So, we acted. We acted like somebody who has two lumps of cancer, one lump is the atomic cancer, the spectrum of atomic bombs, and the second one is the spectrum of 20,000 ballistic missiles, one-ton ballistic missiles that fall, Mach six to Mach eight, right from the sky. And they destroy everything that they touch. Twenty thousand of those in the state, the size of New Jersey. Right, bigger than Rhode Island, bigger than Rhode Island. But that's it, you know? Well, that's equivalent to two nuclear bombs."
"So we had to act. If we didn't act, we'd die. And with us would die the whole story, the three and a half millennia story of the Jewish people," Netanyahu declared. "If you don't act, you're not going to be here. So we acted with the incredible help of President Trump and those brave pilots of the United States."