Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel refused to directly answer questions Saturday about whether he too bore some responsibility for the deaths of more than 1,400 Israelis in the Hamas-led surprise attack on Oct. 7.

Taking questions from reporters for the first time since the cross-border incursion three weeks ago incited a war between Israel and Hamas, Netanyahu said, “For now, my supreme mission is to save the country and lead our soldiers to total victory.”

“After the war, everyone will need to give answers to hard questions, including me,” Netanyahu said. “There was a horrible failure, and it will be fully checked. I promise you, no stone will be left unturned.”

Several current and former Israeli officials, including the head of the country’s Shin Bet intelligence service; Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich; and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett; have acknowledged some responsibility for the failure to prevent Palestinian gunmen from killing and kidnapping Israelis in towns near the border with the Gaza Strip.

Some Israeli commentators have blamed Netanyahu’s current right-wing coalition government, which pursued a wide-ranging judicial overhaul that tore the country apart and prompted scores of Israelis to say they would refuse volunteer reserve duty in the military. The controversy shook Israel’s security establishment and left it in turmoil, they argue.

Others have pointed to Netanyahu’s role in overseeing Israel’s policy of seeking an economic accommodation with Hamas — including allowing hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar to enter Gaza annually — in exchange for a fragile cease-fire. Critics say those economic incentives ultimately propped up Hamas’ rule, rather than moderating it.

Netanyahu has strongly rebuffed both claims. “They say that I wanted to strengthen Hamas,” he said. “Certainly not me. I led three campaigns against Hamas.” And he argued that those campaigns “weakened the military capabilities of Hamas and at least prevented it from growing stronger.”

Still, Netanyahu said, in hindsight, it wasn’t enough.

He said Israeli authorities were doing all they could to bring back the at least 230 people confirmed to be held hostage after Oct. 7. Earlier Saturday, family members of some of the hostages met with Netanyahu after raising concerns that an expanded ground offensive could endanger the lives of their loved ones in Gaza.

“The war inside Gaza will be long and difficult — and we are ready for it,” Netanyahu said Saturday night. “This is our second independence war. We will fight to protect our country. We will fight on land, in the sea and in the air. We will destroy the enemy above ground and underground.”

The prime minister was accompanied by two other top members of the country’s emergency unity government: Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant and former Israeli military chief of staff Benny Gantz, whose National Unity Party joined the government for the duration of the war.

The three have had their differences. Netanyahu briefly tried to fire Gallant in March, while Gantz has severely criticized Netanyahu in the past. But all three hit similar notes in their speeches, preparing Israel’s citizens for what they said would be a protracted and bloody campaign.

At the end of his speech, Netanyahu said the country faced an existential campaign — one equivalent to a second war of independence. The statement was most likely intended as a rallying cry for Israelis, for whom the young state’s triumph against its Arab neighbors in 1948 is a cherished national story.

But for Palestinians, that time holds much darker memories. Around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the wars surrounding Israel’s founding, an event widely known as the Nakba, or catastrophe, in Arabic.

As hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have recently fled their homes in the northern Gaza Strip amid Israeli warnings to evacuate to the southern part of the enclave, some Palestinian officials have drawn their own comparisons to 1948.

One goal of Israeli policy is “to expel the Palestinian people” and “repeat the Nakba,” Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, said in a televised speech Saturday night. Israeli officials have said the evacuation within Gaza was to ensure civilians’ safety as Israeli forces continued their offensive against Hamas there.

The New York Times News Service