Netanyahu faces rising anger from within Israel after Hamas attack
Jerusalem — Angry protesters paid Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a home visit over the weekend, chanting, "jail now!" They were echoing rising cries from across the country for the veteran Israeli leader to step down.
A new poll by an Israeli news station found that 76% of respondents want Netanyahu to resign. Many blame him for the security failures behind Hamas' Oct. 7 terror rampage across southern Israel.
"He must resign!" shouted Moshe Radman outside Netanyahu's home over the weekend.
Radman is one of the Israelis who's been leading the protests against the country's leader. Asked by CBS News what motivated him, he said it was Netanyahu "lying again and again and again."
"A leader needs to think 100% about our soldiers and our country and 0% about himself," he said. "This is for sure not Netanyahu."
Even before the Hamas attack, anger at the veteran Israeli politician was snowballing — over his move to strike down the Israeli Supreme Court's independence this year, over corruption charges he's still battling that date back to 2016, and for billing himself as "mister security" in campaign videos.
In one campaign ad from 2015, he said Israelis would head to the polls to "choose who will take care of our children."
More than three dozen of those children are believed to be among the 241 people Israel says were taken hostage by Hamas.
The Oct. 7 terror attack was Israel's biggest security failure in decades, and the prime minister has not apologized or taken any responsibility for the apparent lapses behind it.
"He thinks about 50 years ahead of time," Tal Schneider, a political correspondent for The Times of Israel, told CBS News. "He doesn't want to have anything on record saying he has responsibility for anything."
Schneider said a loyal cult of support has kept Netanyahu in power — "a base of loyalists," she said, in addition to his own political savvy.
"Netanyahu as a prime minister was compared to President Trump," she said. "Netanyahu is much more sophisticated."
But given the most recent polling, it's unclear if Netanyahu's political career will survive the next time Israelis are asked to elect a leader.
"Enough with it," protest leader Radman told CBS News. "Our country deserves better. Our people deserve better."
- In:
- War
- Hamas
- Israel
- Benjamin Netanyahu
Ramy Inocencio is a foreign correspondent for CBS News based in London and previously served as Asia correspondent based in Beijing.
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