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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended President Donald Trump’s plan for resettling the Gaza Strip’s entire population in third-party countries, while claiming that Gazans will eventually be allowed to return to the Strip if they so choose – so long as they eschew terrorism.
Appearing on Fox News Saturday evening in a pre-recorded interview with Mark Levin, Netanyahu, who left Washington, D.C. for Israel on Sunday, hailed Trump’s proposal, first unveiled last Tuesday, as the “first fresh idea in years.”
“It has the potential to change everything in Gaza,” Netanyahu added, calling it a “novel approach, and the correct approach.”
Netanyahu said the mass relocation would be entirely voluntary, rejecting accusations that it would constitute ethnic cleansing.
It is “not forcible eviction,” the premier noted. “Not ethnic cleansing. Getting out from what all these countries and all these do-gooders say is an open-air prison. Why do you want to keep them in prison?”
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While Trump had appeared on Tuesday to suggest that Gazans would not return to the Strip, Netanyahu said that those who “disavow” terror would eventually be permitted back.
“Give them an option to relocate temporarily while we rebuild the place physically and while we also rebuild it in terms of radicalization. You want to come back? You have to disavow terrorism, but you can come back.”
Netanyahu also denied reports that he had torpedoed hostage deal talks throughout 2024, blaming the Hamas terror organization for the failure to reach a second deal earlier. “That’s false. It’s the ones who are keeping them in those dungeons. These Hamas terrorists, it’s not me.”
The Israeli premier also touted the return of Israeli hostages during the November 2023 deal, the ongoing deal signed last month, and through rescue efforts since October 7, 2023, saying that security experts had once predicted that few if any of the captives would be brought back alive.
“At the beginning of the war, people said, including the most senior defense officials, they said, ‘We’re not going to get any of these hostages out. We have to assume that that’s not going to happen.’”
“I said, ‘No. We’re going to fight Hamas, and at the same time, we’re going to release the hostages.’ And that’s essentially what we’ve been doing up to now. I never gave up on them. And by the end of next week, we’ll probably have about 75% of the living hostages. They’re also holding bodies as hostages. I mean, these are monsters. But we’re going to get 75% of the living hostages out, and I intend to get all of them out.”
