[Video below.] Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu concluded his four-day trip to Washington on Thursday night, boarding the “Wing of Zion” aircraft to return to Israel after meeting twice with President Donald Trump at the White House.
Following the visit, the Prime Minister’s Office released a statement declaring, “All the goals Netanyahu sought to achieve during the visit were accomplished.”
In an interview with Newsmax before departing, Netanyahu shared a guarded sense of hope about the possible return of ten more Israeli hostages who remain in Hamas captivity.
During the conversation, Netanyahu spoke about the current diplomatic efforts to broker a temporary pause in fighting in order to facilitate the release of hostages who were seized during the October 7, 2023, attacks.
He described the suffering endured by the 255 hostages as “hell,” calling Hamas “monsters” for their treatment of those taken.
“Well, they’re monsters. I mean what they do to them and the stories we get are horrible,” Netanyahu stated. “So it’s not easy for us when we’re doing it.”
Netanyahu stressed that Israel is resolute in its mission to recover every last hostage still being held.
“We have 50 left; 20 definitely alive, and some 30 that are not alive, and I want to take them all out,” he told Newsmax. “We now have a deal that supposedly we’ll get half of the living and half of the dead out, and so we’ll have 10 living left and about 12 deceased hostages. But I’ll get them out, too. I hope we can complete in a few days.”
The potential agreement being discussed includes a 60-day pause in hostilities. During that time, some hostages would be released, and talks would continue in pursuit of a broader end to the war. Netanyahu reiterated that peace could happen immediately “if Hamas lays down its arms.”
Shifting focus to the wider humanitarian crisis, Netanyahu condemned Hamas for its treatment of Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, accusing the terror group of hiding behind civilians and turning them into pawns in the conflict.
“It is a fighting force and a governing force in Gaza that oppresses its people, targets our people, our civilians, and uses their civilians as human shields. And then they complain that the civilian losses are because of us,” he told Newsmax. “No, we say to the civilians, ‘Leave. Leave the war zone.’ … And Hamas says, ‘You don’t go. You try to leave the war zone, we’ll shoot you.’ And they shoot them because they want the pictures of dead civilians that they are causing put on Israel’s head. And that’s what you get in TikTok and the social media: ‘Israel is deliberately killing civilians’; no, we’re not. Hamas is deliberately killing its own people, preventing them from escaping the war zone. So they’re monsters.”
Netanyahu also pointed to a significant and unusual development unfolding within Gaza: Palestinian Arabs themselves are beginning to rise up against Hamas’s iron grip.
“There are Palestinians fighting Hamas because we weaken them to this point,” Netanyahu told Newsmax. “We see something that never happened before. Palestinians in Gaza are fighting Hamas. Palestinians in Gaza are defying Hamas. Palestinians in Gaza are saying, ‘We don’t want them. We don’t want to be tyrannized and subjugated by these monsters.'”
He ended the interview with a firm message of determination: “Well, that didn’t happen before, and we think we can bring it to completion. So I wouldn’t tell you that we have a war goal that is unachievable. We’re going to defeat these monsters and get our hostages back.”
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{Matzav.com}