Netanyahu says Israel is giving

Tel-Aviv — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with “News Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil on Tuesday night at the Rabin Medical Center outside Tel Aviv, where the Israeli leader and his wife Sara visited newly returned hostages and their families on their first full day back together.

Each of the former hostages described their experience in captivity to the prime minister, detailing long hours held underground with limited access to sunlight and shortages of food.

Avinatan Or, who lost at least 60 pounds in Hamas captivity, was still enjoying the embrace of his partner, another former hostage, Noa Argamani.

Netanyahu said he learned that, like many of the other former detainees, he never lost hope.

“They believed that one way or another we would get them out,” the Israeli leader told News themezone.

Now, the primary question is whether this moment of hope for Israel and the region can last.

Israel is giving “peace a chance,” but the war is not over

President Trump has repeatedly stated since helping negotiate the ceasefire and hostage release agreement that went into effect Friday that the war is over. But clearly it is not.

• Netanyahu on Trump saying he’s “not the easiest guy to deal with”

Israeli troops are still deployed in more than half of Gaza, and in the rest of the decimated Palestinian territory, the News themezone team in Gaza has seen Hamas back on the streets, still armed and reportedly clashing with rival groups, once again exerting its power.

When asked about those realities, Netanyahu told News themezone that his government had agreed to “give peace a chance.”

He noted that the conditions of President Trump’s 20-point peace plan “are very clear: it’s not just that we take out the hostages without taking out our military, but that later we will have both demilitarization and disarmament. They are not the same thing. First, Hamas has to hand over its weapons. And second, we have to make sure that there are no weapons factories inside Gaza. There is no weapons smuggling into Gaza.

• Netanyahu: Hamas must disarm or “all hell will break loose”

“We also agreed: OK, let’s finish the first part. Now let’s give the opportunity to do the second part peacefully, which is my hope.”

Netanyahu, in his wide-ranging interview with Dokoupil, said that “it is always the responsibility of the leader of the Jewish State to ensure that the Jewish State is never in danger with its very existence.”

In a US survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in late September, only 35% of respondents expressed a positive opinion of Israel’s government, down from 47% in 2022, before the war began. The survey also revealed a significant age gap in American support for the Trump administration’s provision of robust military aid to Israel in the midst of the war: Those over 65 were more than twice as likely as those under 30 (34% vs. 13%) to say the U.S. was providing “about the right amount of aid to Israel.”

Dokoupil asked Netanyahu if and how it would be possible to correct those perceptions.

“I think so,” the Israeli leader said. “I think the first solution is to end the war as quickly as possible, something I have tried to do against all this contrary propaganda. Of course I want to end the war. Who wants it to continue? You know, I have been in wars myself, I have been in battles… you have to be crazy to want wars to be prolonged.”

There are many challenges to reaching even that initial goal, as Hamas has so far refused to fully disarm, the remains of at least 20 deceased Israeli hostages have yet to be returned and Israel said Wednesday it would limit the amount of humanitarian aid entering Gaza, delaying key aspects of the first phase of Trump’s peace deal.

But what comes next is also unclear.

Who will govern Gaza?

Dokoupil asked Netanyahu a question that Trump’s peace plan answered only vaguely: Who will govern Gaza when the war ends?

“The only names mentioned are Donald Trump and Tony Blair. Will Tony Blair be the president of Gaza?” Dokoupil asked, referring to the former British leader chosen by Trump to serve on a transitional “peace board” to help manage the enclave and its roughly 2 million residents.

“I doubt it,” Netanyahu responded. “But I think this is a transition period and we want to create, you know, a governance that works, that is not made up of people committed to our destruction. Because if we… if we put them there, then we will just repeat it over and over and over again. And we don’t want a repeat of the October 7 massacre.”

Netanyahu acknowledged that while many Gazans, including young people who have endured two years of brutal war, may want to continue fighting Israel, “Gaza is not uniform.”

“There are Gazans who are fighting Hamas and saying: ‘We don’t want this anymore… many people in Gaza now know that Hamas has brought them catastrophic consequences because of their fanaticism.”

“The most important thing to destroy fanaticism is to destroy some hope,” Netanyahu said. “The hope that fanaticism will achieve its results. When people know that Israel is here to stay, they will not destroy the Jewish state.”

However, how best to achieve that ambition remains a topic of intense debate.

Netanyahu on the prospect of a two-state solution

The United Nations and many world leaders have long insisted that the only way to ensure lasting peace in the Middle East is to give the Palestinian people something they have not had since the creation of the modern State of Israel nearly eight decades ago: an independent state of their own.

Global Pressure has been increasing on Israel. accept the creation of a Palestinian state along its borders, a concept that has long been called the two-state solution.

But in recent years, the Netanyahu government has rejected the idea, and the Trump administration has decisively abandoned the US government’s long-standing calls for a Palestinian state.

“When I talked about it, it was not the proposal that people make now,” Netanyahu told Dokoupil on Tuesday. “I suppose they are two sovereign states and a sovereign state has, for example, military power, can make pacts… The Palestinians should have all the powers on a peaceful day to govern themselves, but they cannot have the powers to threaten our survival. That sovereign security power must remain in the hands of Israel.”

“Otherwise, the jihadists will take power,” Netanyahu said. “Iran takes power immediately. And that’s what happened every time we left territory: the most extreme fanatics came in.”

He accepted that ceding some territory to Palestinian authorities, as Israel did in Gaza, did not amount to creating an independent state, but said it was “perfectly aligned with the reality” of circumstances on the ground.

“It’s a reality that if you had a Palestinian government that stopped teaching its children to destroy the State of Israel… obviously, if you have that and they educate them for peace, then I think you can have a different reality,” the Israeli leader said, adding that it “could take generations” to get to that point.

And even if Israel eventually considers Gaza’s leadership and population to have been deradicalized, Netanyahu said it would still need to remain “in control of military power to prevent our destruction.”

In:

• War
• Hamas
• Israel
• Cease-fire
• donald trump
• Palestinians
• Gaza Strip
• Middle East
• Benjamin Netanyahu