Netanyahu Tells Fox News He ‘Intends to’ Take Full Control of Gaza to ‘Liberate’ Palestinians From Hamas
Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer sat down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday and asked him if he plans to fully occupy Gaza.
Hemmer played clips from the interview during America’s Newsroom. In one such clip, he asked, “After this interview, you will go immediately into a meeting with your security cabinet. Will Israel take control of all of Gaza?”
“We intend to, in order to assure our security, remove Hamas there, enable the population to be free of Gaza and to pass it to civilian governance. That is not Hamas and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel,” Netanyahu replied, adding:
That’s what we want to do. We want to liberate ourselves and liberate the people of Gaza from the awful terror of Hamas. And you were in the Gaza Strip today. You met Palestinians who are fighting Hamas. Because finally they see that they have a future. They can rid themselves of this awful tyranny that not only holds our hostages, but holds two million Palestinians in Gaza hostage. That’s got to end.
“Are you saying today that you will take control of the entire 26-mile Gaza Strip, as it was 20 years ago to this month in 2005?” Hemmer followed up.
“Well, we don’t want to keep it. We want to have a security perimeter. We don’t want to govern it. We don’t want to be there as a governing body. We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us and giving the Gazans a good life. That’s not possible with Hamas. The only way that you’re going to have a different future is to get rid of this neo-Nazi army,” Netanyahu replied, adding:
Hamas are monsters. Look at what they’re doing to our people. Look at what they’re doing to the way they massacred, raped, beheaded our people, our men and women, burned our babies, and they are really cruel to their own people.
Because when we try to take them away from the combat zones, they shoot them. They want people to be civilian casualties. They want a starvation policy that they themselves are trying to put into being. And we’re doing everything to reverse that.
Hemmer then discussed the clip, “So in summary, he did not deny it. In fact, I got the strong inclination that that’s what he would like to do. The Israeli government, the rest of them, they may have a very different opinion, but we have reached a critical point here that if you do this operation, if you go in to root out Gaza and certain parts of the Gaza Strip, that’s an operation that may take four or five months.”
“Keep in mind, the Israeli chief of the army here in Jerusalem says the military’s exhausted. And there are many people in this country who are sick and tired of war. How this goes down remains to be seen. Two things he said: We intend to, and we don’t want to keep it. They’ve been there before,” concluded Hemmer.
Watch the clip above via Fox News.
