(Communicated by the Prime Minister's Media Adviser)
 
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, today (Tuesday, 30 September 2014), in New York, met with Jewish federation leaders and made the following remarks:
 
"Every time I come to the UN I try to tell the truth as it is. But here's a picture I didn't show in the UN yesterday. This is an impending execution. But this isn't ISIS, this is Hamas. And during the recent fighting in Gaza, right around the time that ISIS was doing its grisly deeds, Hamas executed dozens of Palestinians just to impose fear and force the population of Gaza into submission. It's true there are some differences between Hamas and ISIS – for example ISIS beheads people and Hamas puts a bullet in the back of their heads. But to the victims, and the victims' families, the horror is the same.

The point I was trying to make yesterday and I'm making today is that we are faced with a world-wide network of militant Islamists, groups and regimes. It's not that they have a common war-room. They have war-rooms against each other because all of them wish to dominate first the region in which they are in and then ultimately the entire world. But they all share this fanatic ideology; they all have not only unbridled ambitions but also savage methods. And the more they have the capability to realize their ambitions, the more they'll unleash their pent-up aggression against our common civilizations.

This is the point that I think is most important – We all support the efforts led by President Obama to stop and defeat ISIS, there's no question that that has to be done. But to defeat ISIS and leave Iran as a threshold nuclear power is, as I said yesterday and I'll say it again, is to win the battle and lose the war. We have to stop ISIS, defeat ISIS, but we have to prevent Iran from getting the capability to produce nuclear weapons."