Netanyahu denounces Macron over calls to stop arms deliveries to Israel

French president says he wants a ‘political solution’

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, issued a furious denunciation of Emmanuel Macron on Saturday over his calls for a worldwide arms embargo on Israel.
“I have a message for president Macron,” Mr Netanyahu said in a video address.
“Israel will win with or without,” the support of France, the prime minister said as he cited the threats to Israel on seven fronts.
Referring to Mr Macron’s remarks as a “disgrace”, Mr Netanyahu said France’s “shame will continue long after the war is won”.
“As Israel fights the forces of barbarism led by Iran, all civilised countries should be standing firmly by Israel’s side. Yet, president Macron and other Western leaders are now calling for arms embargoes against Israel. Shame on them.”
As the world waits to see how Israel will respond to the 200 missiles Iran fired at air bases and Mossad’s headquarters last week, Mr Netanyahu promised a forceful response.
“Israel has the duty and the right to defend itself and respond to such attacks – and this is what we are going to do,” Mr Netanyahu said.
Mr Macron had said: “I think that today, the priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop delivering weapons to fight in Gaza.”
“France is not delivering any,” he added during an interview recorded early this week.
The United States provides about $3 billion in weapons to Israel each year.
In May, the State Department said it did not have enough evidence to block shipments of weapons but that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel has used arms in ways inconsistent with standards of humanitarian law.
In September, Britain said it was suspending some arms exports to Israel, citing a “clear risk” that they could be used in a serious breach of international humanitarian law.
On Saturday, Israel was increasingly confident it had killed the likely successor to Hassan Nasrallah, former Hezbollah leader, in an air strike last week.
Contact with Hashem Safieddine has been lost since the Israeli attack on Beirut on Thursday night, a high-level Hezbollah source told AFP.
“We don’t know if he was at the targeted site, or who may have been there with him,” the source said.
Israel’s strike at Hezbollah’s underground intelligence headquarters in the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh involved around 60 tons of bombs, according to Israel’s N12 news.
Saudi TV channel Al Hadath quoted sources who said that “the scope of the attack in Beirut, which was aimed at the culprit Safieddine, leaves no room to escape alive”.
Reuters quoted Lebanese security sources who said that ongoing Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh since Friday have kept rescue workers from scouring the site of the attack.
Ronen Solomon, an Israeli intelligence and defence analyst who has worked for over a decade in the Ministry of Defence, said the hit on Safieddine, who was serving as part of the group’s executive council that oversees the military operations and civilian structure, paves the way for more to come.
“Safieddine is well known as number two in the pyramid. But now, his deputy Sheikh Ali Damoush, the commander of the foreign relations unit, hasn’t been killed yet, so maybe he will be next on the blacklist,” he said.
Safieddine’s brother Abdullah oversees relations with Quds Force and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and is deeply entrenched in Iran’s political and military elite, based in Tehran. 
“Abdullah is also a possible target,” added Mr Solomon. “He is well known as the head of the business unit of Hezbollah, connected to the external relationship unit and is the connection man between Iran and Hezbollah.”
In 2017, the US Treasury added Safieddine to its counter-terrorism blacklist. “He was more extreme than Nasrallah,” added Mr Solomon, comparing Nasrallah’s apparent successor to the ageing leader killed in an air strike last month.
“Nasrallah was very realistic about Israel and took decisions step by step. Safieddine was much more unpredictable and took his lead from the commanders of the Radwan Force,” Mr Solomon said.
Gabriel Noronha, who from 2019 to 2021 served as special adviser for the Iran Action Group at the US Department of State, said the latest assassination of a possible new leader for Hezbollah puts the group’s sponsor, Iran, in a quandary.
“I don’t think Iran has recourse,” he said. “They made a very risky decision to do this counter-strike this week,” in response to the killings of Mr Nasrallah in Beirut and July’s assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas political leader, in Tehran.
“They’d already proven in April the inability to penetrate the Iron Dome and do real damage. To really overpower the Iron Dome, they’d have to launch multiple salvos, and more like 500 missiles, which is essentially a declaration of war.”
Hezbollah has been severely damaged by Israel’s combination of targeted strikes, explosions of communications devices, air strikes and a ground invasion, Mr Noronha.
“From the pager attack onwards, it was about hitting command and control,” he said. “The combination of the complete lack of command and control and the inability of the leadership to speak to the rank and file, has paralysed the Hezbollah response. The further you go into that leadership level is eliminating a will to fight and ability to coordinate any kind of response.”
Jason Brodsky, the policy director at the NGO United Against a Nuclear Iran, said that the suspected killing “has highlighted the succession crisis Hezbollah now faces”.
“The decapitation of figures with relationships, networks, institutional memory, and experience hobbles the organisation,” he said.