Leader of the Opposition MK Yair Lapid says that Israel should have bombed Iran’s oil and energy infrastructure during the recent war with the Islamic Republic, and that the government had made a mistake in refraining from such attacks.
“I would have bombed all the main energy installations, all the oil fields,” the Yesh Atid leader says during an interview on Channel 12’s “Meet the Press.”
“If you want to topple the Iranian government, you need to take out the Iranian economy, and afterwards the next [Iranian] government would need to build it again from scratch over years,” Lapid continues, adding that he expressed this opinion to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during security briefings Lapid received during the war.
Lapid said that Netanyahu merely “mumbled” in response.
Turning to politics and his union with Naftali Bennett to create the Together party, Lapid says that Bennett is more fitting for him to be prime minister at present because, he ventured, Israel needs a right-wing leader at the moment.
“Naftali Bennett is the right person at the right time,” says Lapid, but insists that this was not a dig at Together’s main rival in the opposition camp, Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party.
“I’m not saying he’s better or more fitting than Gadi Eisenkot, I’m saying he’s better and more fitting than me at this moment.”
He continues, “We need right now a leader from the right. I need someone who was prime minister, who was defense minister, who was education minister, who was economy minister, who established a government, who dismantled a government, who lost, not just who won, and he is a person of the right… I put myself, my party, and my trust behind him.”
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