Liberman: Cabinet ministers wanted to stop me, not Hamas

Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party has polled below the 3.25% electoral threshold in several recent polls.

By LAHAV HARKOV
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman conducted a situation assessment today in the Gaza Division (photo credit: ARIEL HERMONI / DEFENSE MINISTRY)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman conducted a situation assessment today in the Gaza Division
(photo credit: ARIEL HERMONI / DEFENSE MINISTRY)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the security cabinet blocked actions against Hamas for seven months, leading to continued weekly conflagrations, former defense minister Avigdor Liberman said at a cultural event on Saturday.
Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu Party has polled below the 3.25% electoral threshold in several recent polls.
“From April until November, I tried to change things from the inside, and convince [ministers] of what I thought was right, to thwart the terror, but there were members of the security cabinet who thought it was right to thwart the defense minister,” Liberman said, explaining his resignation as defense minister. “In the end, for me, there was no choice but to get up and go.”
Liberman said he demanded that action be taken in July to stop the weekly rioting along the Gaza border, including targeted assassinations of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders, but that Netanyahu refused. The former defense minister also voiced his opposition to transferring $15 million to Hamas.
“Israel is funding terror against itself,” he said, adding that he was against “a ceasefire under Hamas’s conditions after we were hit by 500 rockets.”
He called the situation in the South “a surrender to terror.”
“The government’s policies in the South will bring us in two years to a situation by which the danger in the South will be no less than that in the North,” he said.
Liberman warned that there is increased coordination between Hamas and Hezbollah, which can bring about a situation “more dangerous than the eve of the Yom Kippur War.”