A strong continued and sustained military campaign is the only way to destroy Hamas and ensure that captives in Gaza are freed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said as talks continued with Qatar about a hostage deal.
“Without the military pressure, we would not have been able to produce the [former] agreement which resulted in the release of 110 captives,” Netanyahu told reporters in Tel Aviv in a joint press event with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Minister Benny Gantz.
“Only the continuation of the military pressure will lead to the release of all our captives,” the prime minister stated.
“The instructions I give to the negotiating team are based on this military pressure – and without it we have nothing,” he said.
Netanyahu spoke one day after the IDF mistakenly shot three of the hostages in Gaza after they had apparently escaped their captors. The soldiers believed the three Israeli men were Hamas terrorists and not captives, even though they waved a white flag and called out in Hebrew.
Netanyahu rejects criticism of maximum-pressure strategy
The event raised questions about the reliance on the IDF’s military campaign to secure the release of over 120 remaining captives in Gaza.
Netanyahu pushed back at that criticism on Saturday night, stating that he held fast to this strategy and had relayed it to US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan when he visited Israel last Thursday and Friday.
Israel will press forward with its “military and diplomatic efforts to bring the hostages home safely,” the premier said.
He spoke after Mossad chief David Barnea met with Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani in Europe late on Friday, according to a source with knowledge of the matter, as attention turned to a possible new pause to the Gaza war that would accompany a new hostage deal.
The meeting between Barnea and Al Thani was apparently the first between senior officials from the two countries since the last deal fell apart at the end of November.
Qatar mediated that agreement together with Egypt, and is working on trying to create a second one.
Israel has been under intense international pressure to halt the war. Sullivan spoke with Netanyahu about moving from a high-intensity to a low-intensity military campaign, even as it backed Israel’s right to wage war against Hamas.
The war was sparked by Hamas’s October 7 infiltration into southern Israel, in which terrorists killed over 1,200 people and seized some 250 hostages.
“We are at war for our existence. We must continue the war until we are victorious, despite international pressures and despite the unbearably heavy price that the war exacts from us in the loss of our cherished sons and daughters,” Netanyahu said.
Total victory is the only way to ensure that soldiers have not fallen in vain, he stated.
“We are more determined than ever to continue until the end – until we eliminate Hamas, until we return all our captives, and until we ensure that in Gaza there is no longer any factor that educates about terrorism, finances terrorism, and executes terrorism.”
He pushed back at the US vision that a revitalized Palestinian Authority would control Gaza.
“I will not allow us to replace Hamastan with Fatahstan, or to replace Khan Yunis with Jenin,” Netanyahu stated.
“The debate between Hamas and Fatah is not about whether to eliminate the State of Israel, but only about how to do so,” Netanyahu exclaimed.
The Palestinian Authority has “simply refused to condemn the [October 7] massacre, and some of them even glorify it with relish,” he said, asking how can it rule Gaza after the war: “Have we learned nothing? As prime minister of Israel, I will not let this happen.”
Netanyahu: I am proud that I prevented a Palestinian state
After Hamas is destroyed, the Gaza Strip will be demilitarized and remain under Israeli security control, he stressed.
Netanyahu warned that Israel did not want to repeat the mistake of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which allowed for the creation of a Palestinian Authority and set Israel on a path to a two-state resolution to the conflict.
US President Joe Biden and his top officials have spoken about the importance of returning to a two-state peace process.
Netanyahu, however, stated: “I am proud that I prevent the creation of a Palestinian state” because now everyone understands what would have happened if this had occurred.
He referenced the security cabinet’s decision to open the Kerem Shalom crossing for humanitarian goods, stressing that it was done in conjunction with a US promise to renovate Egypt’s crossing into Gaza. Once that renovation project is completed, the Kerem Shalom crossing will be closed, he said.
Netanyahu also stressed that a solution had to be found for Hezbollah’s threat against Israel on the northern border, explaining that the situation cannot be left as it is, given that the close to 100,000 Israelis who fled that area have to be allowed to return safely.