PNN – The Prime Minister of Israel said on Monday that increasing the defense budget is the biggest challenge facing the regime after winning the war against Hamas.
According to Pakistan News Network, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that increasing the defense budget is the biggest challenge facing the regime after winning the war against Hamas.
Netanyahu said that Israel must significantly increase its defense budget considering that it is surrounded by “extremist forces” that want to destroy Israel.
Netanyahu, who was present at the ceremony to extend the second term of Amir Yaron’s presidency at the Central Bank, said: “We must strengthen ourselves.” We need the ability to build coalitions both within and outside the region. This issue requires a significant increase in the defense budget.
These statements are made in the context that the Israeli regime is conducting temporary operations in Gaza. The war in Gaza has been going on for more than 2 months now, and at the same time, Israel is also engaged in the northern front with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Netanyahu claimed that Israel had been able to increase its defense budget in absolute terms and reduce the share of this budget in the GDP.
He said that the continuation of this policy is no longer possible because the defense budget must increase by 20 billion shekels (equivalent to 5.5 billion dollars) annually. According to Netanyahu, this amount of increase will be equivalent to 1 percent of the GDP.
He further noted: “After winning the war, this is the biggest challenge we are facing.”
Netanyahu’s statements were made in a situation where international criticism of Israel has intensified due to the increase in civilian casualties in Gaza.
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EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Monday that Israel does not distinguish between military and civilian targets when it bombards areas in Gaza.
“We are witnessing the appalling practice of indiscriminate Israeli military operations in Gaza,” Burrell said. Worshipers, three Israeli hostages and hundreds of civilians have been killed in recent Israeli operations. This has to stop. “There is an urgent need to stop the war on humanitarian actions.”
These criticisms of the Israeli regime are raised after the regime officials claimed on Friday that three Israeli prisoners in Gaza were mistakenly identified as a “threat” during an operation in the Al-Shuja’iyah area and killed them.
The wrongful killing of these three captives has increased the pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu. In the past days, he has been heavily criticized on the one hand because of the security-intelligence failure of the October 7 attack and on the other hand because of his inability to return the prisoners from Gaza.
Mariva Zanzin, one of the analysts of the International Crisis Group, said about 10 days ago that the families of the Gaza prisoners are “extremely angry” that the Israeli army resumed military operations in Gaza before completing the prisoner exchange process with Hamas.
Before that, the 12 channel of the Zionist regime had reported the chaos in the meeting between the families of prisoners in Gaza with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel.
This media had reported that Netanyahu apparently informed Osra’s family in this meeting that he could not return all the prisoners. After that, the meeting was chaotic and the families of the prisoners left the meeting.
Nearly 19,000 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip after the fierce attacks of the Israeli regime in this area, and thousands of others were injured.
On October 7th, the Islamic resistance movement of Palestine, Hamas, in response to more than seven decades of occupation of Palestine and nearly two decades of siege of Gaza and imprisonment and torture of thousands of Palestinians, started the operation known as “Al-Aqsa Storm”.
This operation was one of the deadliest attacks against this regime. Hamas fighters penetrated into the occupied territories through the border fences at several points, attacked the villages and besides killing a large number of Israelis, captured a number of them.
In response to this operation, the Zionist regime launched heavy attacks against Gaza and put this area under complete siege. Despite this, as analysts say, the al-Aqsa storm operation has imposed a major security-political defeat on Israel.