TIME fact-checks Netanyahu interview: PM's claims on October 7, Hamas found to be false

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conducted an exclusive interview with TIME Magazine at the beginning of August. Now, having checked the PM’s statements, TIME reported last week that it found many of them to be false.

On the topic of Israel’s tacit and direct financial support for Hamas before Oct. 7 in the August 4 interview, Netanyahu claimed, “It’s not only my government [that supported them]. It’s the previous government, the government before me, and the government after me.  [My government] wasn’t bankrolling Hamas.”

However, as TIME pointed out, Netanyahu’s previous government reportedly began transferring $30 million a month to the Gaza Strip in 2014.

Funding Hamas

Additionally, when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas sanctioned Hamas in 2018, Netanyahu’s government delivered funds in suitcases. 

Throughout this period, Qatari funds would be allowed to reach the Gaza Strip and Hamas until former PM Naftali Bennett ended the transit of money in 2021.

In another segment of Netanyahu’s August 4 interview, he claimed, “I don’t think it made that big a difference because the main issue was the transfer of weapons and ammunition from the Sinai into Gaza. That’s what made them – it wasn’t so much a question of money. It was a question of availability.”

However, TIME claimed that weapons became available thanks to the over $1 billion given by Qatar to Hamas.

Supporting Hamas

Netanyahu, in the original interview, also denied stating he had ever expressed support for Hamas.

However, the PM allegedly told journalist Dan Margalit in 2012 that Hamas should stick around as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority.

Netanyahu's assessment of the Hamas threat

Speaking on October 7, Netanyahu claimed it "showed that those who said that Hamas was deterred were wrong. If anything, I didn’t challenge enough the assumption that was common to all the security agencies.”

However, in the months leading up to Hamas’s October 7 terror attacks on southern Israel, Netanyahu told Channel 14 that he had prevented a future attack from the enclave thanks to a 2021 operation.

Further adding to Netanyahu’s failed assessment of the Hamas threat, he wrote in his 2012 autobiography, Bibi: My Story, that Hamas was contained.

“Did I really want to tie down the IDF in Gaza for years when we had to deal with Iran and a possible Syrian front?” he wrote. “The answer was categorically no. I had bigger fish to fry.”