Liberman: Make aid to Gaza conditional on Red Cross access to hostages

By Carrie Keller-Lynn 16 October 2023, 2:32 pm Edit

Carrie Keller-Lynn is a former political and legal correspondent for The Times of Israel

Yisrael Beytenu party chairman MK Avigdor Liberman leads a faction meeting at the Knesset in Jerusalem, on October 9, 2023. (Oren Ben Hakoon/Flash90)

Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman calls for making humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip contingent upon a Red Cross welfare check upon hostages taken by Hamas to the Gaza Strip on October 7.

Addressing himself to “everyone who speaks now about humanitarian aid,” he demands that it be “provisioned that they get don’t get one crumb, that one liter of water won’t be transferred until the Red Cross sees our abductees.”

The right-wing opposition party head says that “otherwise, it’s abandoning our hostages.”

Israel has already turned on the taps to southern Gaza, where it has urged civilians to flee, ahead of an expected Israeli ground invasion into Gaza’s north.

Explaining his rationale, Liberman says Hamas’s massacres in Israel’s southern Gaza border communities — from where many of the hostages were taken — was horrific.

“I am returning shocked from a visit at Kibbutz Kfar Aza. I thought that such atrocities could only be seen in movies about Nazis.”

“We aren’t talking about humans, we’re talking about Nazi monsters,” Liberman says.