Katz boasted of being first to tackle Gaza's 'metro'. Netanyahu in 2021: 'We sent it to the trash'

Defense Minister Israel Katz claimed in an interview with Channel 14 that the tunnel threat in Gaza was addressed for the first time under his tenure, and called former Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi's statements about destroying the metro a "joke." However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in a 2021 speech that Israel struck over 100 kilometers of tunnels, and that Hamas's plan "went down the drain."

Defense Minister Israel Katz boasted in an interview with the "Patriots" program on Channel 14 that for the first time under his tenure, the threat of Hamas's tunnels, known as the "Gaza metro," was addressed. Katz claimed that former Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, who was in office during Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021, presented a false picture when he declared the destruction of the metro, calling those statements a "joke." According to him, "we didn't destroy even 3%." However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in a speech in May 2021, after the operation ended, that Israel struck over 100 kilometers of tunnels in the metro complex, and that Hamas's plan "went down the drain." Netanyahu then said: "Hamas can no longer hide, and this is a tremendous achievement for the State of Israel." The article quotes Netanyahu's words from that speech, in which he described the strike on the tunnels as "an achievement that no army in the world has achieved to this day." Katz, who was Finance Minister during the operation, said that "there is a world of tunnels there that no one has cleared in the past." The article notes that about two and a half years after the operation ended, on October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded the Gaza border communities.