A former prime minister of Israel has said Benjamin Netanyahu should not remain the leader of the country in the long run after Hamas’s unprecedented incursion.

In an interview with Sky News’s Mark Austin, Ehud Barak said the attack was “shocking for everyone in the country”.

“It’s a barbarian murderous act that reminds you of al Qaeda or Daesh-like operations, unheard of.

“It was the most severe blow Israel suffered since the day of its establishment,” he said.

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Asked if Mr Netanyahu can survive as prime minister in the long run, he said: “I think he shouldn’t. I think that in a normal place he would have resigned.

“Just by looking at the kind of thing that happened under his responsibility, even if he were not involved in any way, that put a huge responsibility on him personally.”

Mr Barak, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 1999 to 2001 and is now the voice of the opposition, said the purpose of the Israeli response was “well defined”, explaining: “It is to make sure that any military capability of Hamas will be paralysed and erased.

“No military cover, not a single launcher for rockets, not a single magazine dump or lab, or training site. And that’s the purpose.

“We [would have been] lucky if it could have been completed from the air, [but] it cannot be accomplished, so you have to come on the ground, so highly probably there will be a wide-scale operation on the ground.”

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Asked how Israel can avoid civilian casualties, Mr Barak said: “Israel is not going to deteriorate into the behaviour of Hamas. We are committed to international law.

“[To] the population, we said we are going to hit every asset of Hamas. So any one of you citizens of Gaza who knows that in his residential place, in the working place, there is any installation of Hamas, asset of Hamas now or in the last, let’s say a year or two, be careful.

“This is a target. Leave the area. Don’t stay there. We are serious.”

Discussing the blockade on Gaza, he said: “Israel will not let people die in the hospital of Gaza because we blocked a medical kind of drugs or whatever the hospital needs. No baby will die because there is no milk because of Israel.”

A siren sounded midway through the interview, bringing it to a momentary pause.

“Take it from me, it won’t land here, the missile,” Mr Barak said.

Asked if his attempt to negotiate a peace deal in 2000 with Yasser Arafat, then the Palestinian president, was a missed opportunity, Mr Barak said: “You cannot judge whether it’s a missed chance. People tell me you were so close, so close with Arafat. How come you didn’t come to an agreement?

“I say when you want to measure the size of a gap, you have to multiply the width by the depth. We were probably very close, but very deep.

“Myself and [then US president Bill] Clinton put on the table a far-reaching proposal that covered metaphorically more than 90% of whatever Arafat can dream of.

“The fact that he rejected it… And till these days, Clinton still, when he’s asked, he says Arafat is responsible because we were very serious and he rejected it.”

Image:
The then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak with US president Bill Clinton and Palestinian president Yasser Arafatin the 1990s

He said “we are further than 25 years ago” from a genuine peace.

However, he added: “But I never lose eye contact with the objective.

“The objective should be engagement with the Palestinians and solving with a border inside the Holy Land, where we have 80% of our settlers and all the strategic interests of Israel to live side by side with the Palestinian state, which [is] demilitarised but kind of viable.

“That’s the vision because we need it.”