“Too many people have been killed,” Trump said at the G7 conference summit in France. “You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody, because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they’re not all Hezbollah.”
Netanyahu has not publicly addressed Trump’s comments about him.
With Iran and the U.S. scheduled to sign a draft agreement on Friday, Netanyahu is also feeling the heat from the Israeli public.
The country went to war against Iran alongside the U.S. in late February, and its population endured weeks of Iranian counterattacks from ballistic missiles and drones.
Netanyahu’s government has been criticized for not going far enough to hobble Iran, an adversary many see as posing an existential threat, and its main proxy group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
In a survey from the Israeli Democracy Institute published two weeks ago, 57.5% of Israelis said they believe ending the conflict under the currently discussed framework won’t be compatible with Israel’s security interests.
Netanyahu’s domestic rivals have lashed out at the prime minister.
“Israel is paying the price of Netanyahu’s hubris and blindness, and the price of the manipulations that he tried to pull on Trump,” former Prime Minister Ehud Barak said in an interview Monday. “Iran emerged stronger; Israel emerged weaker. That is Netanyahu’s strategic responsibility. He failed.”
The deal framework is “one of the most shocking failures in Israel’s foreign and security policy … entirely registered in Netanyahu’s name,” said Yair Lapid, who is expected to challenge Netanyahu in this year’s elections.
“It can be fixed, it must be fixed,” he wrote. “Netanyahu can no longer fix it, we will do it.”
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