Netanyahu To Fox News: Israel Will Take Control of Gaza to ‘Liberate’ People from Hamas

In an interview with Fox News’ Bill Hemmer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel plans to take military control of all of Gaza. He further noted that control will not be permanent and control will eventually be handed over to armed forces that will “govern it properly.”

Hemmer: We sat down for about 25 minutes and we covered the range of topics that have been the news and the headlines over the past almost two years, including allegations about starvation and genocide. And most importantly for this Israeli government and the Israeli military, what are they going to do next?

Dana, they have reached a critical point in this war. They right now control 75% of the Gaza Strip. It’s a 26-mile path there, okay? 25%, a quarter of Gaza has yet to be conquered. This is the critical decision that Benjamin Netanyahu is now weighing. And in our interview, just moments ago, he gave us a strong indication at the moment as to where he is leading.

Hemmer asked Netanyahu, “After this interview, you will go immediately into a meeting with your security cabinet. Will Israel take control of all of Gaza?”

Netanyahu: 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. That’s what we want to do.

We want to liberate ourselves and liberate the people of Gaza from the awful terror of Hamas. 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.

Hemmer: 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?

Netanyahu: 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 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. The 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, burn 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 concluded following the interview, “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, in certain parts of the Gaza Strip, that’s an operation that may take four or five months.”

“Keep in mind, the Israeli chief of army here in Jerusalem says the military is 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.”