Israel’s embattled prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu cut a confident and determined figure as he faced the foreign media in a rare live press conference held in his Jerusalem office late afternoon on Sunday.
He began against a backdrop of a screen that read, ‘Open your eyes to Hamas lies’. It was vintage ‘Bibi’: when your back’s against the wall, come out with all guns blazing.
Thousands of his fellow citizens may have been protesting in the streets against his plan to take over Gaza City but Netanyahu was going ahead regardless. This uncompromising approach has marked his attitude to the war from day one and is all the more remarkable given that he has simultaneously been fighting on a second, and far more personal, front.
Israel’s wartime leader has spent many key hours of the last few months in the austere surroundings of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv District Court rooms, where he is on trial for bribery, fraud and ‘breach of trust’.
In the days before he gave the order to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, Netanyahu was not to be found hunkered down with close advisers at his official residence in Jerusalem.
