Ex-PM Bennett challenges Piers Morgan on Gaza war

Former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored on Monday, speaking to the host for about twenty minutes and pushing back against the assertion that Israel was “waging war on children” in Gaza. 

“There’s never been a conflict like this, a war like this, waged against a population where half the population is under 18,” the talk-show host said to Bennett, rejecting the former PM’s comparison to World War II, in which many more German civilians were killed than those of allied countries. 

Gaza has a far lower median age than the United States, Israel, or most Western countries, but it is not unprecedented: Afghanistan, which the United States invaded after the September 11 attacks and fought in for the next twenty years, has a median age of 16.7; Sudan, which is currently the site of a bloody armed conflict, has a median age of 18.6. 

“If any country in the world would be willing to live next to a Hamas-stan,” Bennett responded, “that explicitly says right now that they’re going to conduct more October 7 massacres again and again and again if we don’t eradicate them, then tell me who that is.

“We have absolutely no choice here but to win,” he said, adding, “I won’t be reprimanded for defending my children, for defending my nation. I fought in wars. We hate war. Israelis do not like war. We didn’t start this war.” 

Morgan challenges possibility of Hamas defeat, Bennett cites surrenders, interrogations

Bennett told Morgan that “when you are working with very radical ideologies, you first have to win, and then you can start recovering and rebuilding,” citing the example of Germany after World War II. “We have to defeat Hamas, and then we can start the process of recovery.”

“How will you know when you’ve beaten Hamas?” Morgan asked.

“When they come out and surrender with white flags or we’ve killed them,” Bennett responded.

Morgan pushed back, asking “Why would they surrender?” and asserting to the ex-PM that “they’ve shown no sign of doing that.” 

Bennett took issue with that characterization, responding, “No, there’s hundreds already that have surrendered, perhaps thousands.”

Morgan challenged Bennett on this assertion, saying, “Just to be clear, you’re saying that thousands of Hamas terrorists have surrendered to the IDF and are being held in custody and being interrogated.” Bennett affirmed that this was correct, saying that Israel has interrogated “I believe over 3,000 operatives in varying degrees of involvement.” 

The two men then went back and forth over the definition of a “Hamas operative,” with Bennett distinguishing between the group’s military arm, responsible for the October 7 invasion of Israel as well as other acts of terrorism over the last decades, and the civilian arm of the jihadist government, but saying that the two are “intertwined, much like the Nazis during the Nazi regime” and affirming that civilian officials are of interest to IDF interrogators.

“You’ve just admitted that you’re killing Hamas civilians,” Morgan charged.

“No, I said we’re killing Hamas,” Bennett said. 

Bennett: international pressure is counterproductive, extending the war

Bennett also charged that international pressure on Israel has the counterproductive consequence of extending the suffering of Gazans: “The best way to make this whole misery go away,” the former Israeli leader said, “is to accelerate the pace of this victory, and not tie Israel’s hands behind our back. The longer it takes, the more losses there will be.”

The center-right MK, who served in an elite special forces unit of the IDF before pursuing a high-tech career and eventually going into politics, stressed that the ratio of civilian to combatant casualties in the current war is lower than would be typical in an urban setting such as Gaza, citing a ratio of roughly 2.5 civilians to every one combatant, “compared to 6, 7, 8, and 9 in other wars.”

According to the Hamas-governed Gaza health ministry, almost 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the outbreak of the war when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. These numbers do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Israel says it has killed about 10,000 Hamas operatives, suggesting a ratio of about 2:1 civilians to combatants. 

The typical ratio in urban warfare can be as high as 9:1, according to the Center for Civilians in Armed Conflict. 

Ex-PM rejects Morgan’s characterization of day-after plan as “more effective occupation”

Morgan, whose show recently transitioned to a YouTube-only format, has made waves since Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel, hosting a variety of commentators to debate the war between Israel and the jihadist government of Gaza and its allies. 

Prior to Bennett’s appearance on the show, Morgan delivered a brief monologue condemning the statement by a lawmaker from Britain’s Conservative Party that “Islamists” had “control” of London’s Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, and the leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer. The lawmaker has since been suspended, but the Prime Minister and other party officials have declined to characterize the comment as racist. The comments “were racist,” Morgan said, “and if you don’t agree, it might be because you don’t understand what racism is.” 

The comments, Morgan noted, came against a backdrop of increasing anti-Muslim hate incidents. 

The talk show host then criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s so-called “day after” plan, calling the document, which the Israeli leader shared last week, “insultingly short,” and questioning the assertion that Gaza can be led by “local officials with administrative experience, provided they have no connection to Hamas.”

“Given that Hamas has run Gaza since 2006, exactly who those local administrators are is unclear,” Morgan said. “If Israel can’t find anyone it deems suitable, Israel will remain in control, and frankly that looks like a blueprint for continued occupation, and that will only manufacture more of the radicalization that sparked this deadly war in the first place.”

Bennett took issue with that remark during his interview, telling the host that “a more restrictive occupation of Gaza than [Israel] was doing before October 7”—  Morgan’s characterization of Netanyahu’s proposal— was “not the plan.

“The plan is to have a security umbrella,” Bennett said, “and ultimately allow the Gazans to govern themselves.”