From the Liveblog of
Saturday, April 19, 2025
Netanyahu: Hamas rejected deal to return half of living hostages; I won’t capitulate to demand to end war
Jeremy Sharon is The Times of Israel’s legal affairs and settlements reporter
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Hamas rejected over the weekend a proposal for the return of half of the remaining living hostages and many of the slain hostages it is holding in Gaza, because it is demanding the end of the war and an Israeli military retreat from Gaza.
“If we capitulate to the dictates of Hamas now, all the great achievements of the war, which we achieved with the merit of our soldiers and our fallen and our heroic injured, all these achievements will disappear,” says Netanyahu in a recorded message.
“As your prime minister, I will not capitulate to the murderers who committed the worst massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Capitulation like this will endanger the country and endanger you,” he adds.
“Hamas demands an end to the war and that it stays in power,” he says. “It also demands a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the rehabilitation of Gaza, with an influx of vast sums of money that would enable it to rearm and again prepare attacks on us.
“Ending the war on those terms would send the message to all of Israel’s enemies that by kidnapping Israelis, the State of Israel can be brought to its knees, that it can be defeated,” he says. “It is also a devastating message that terrorism pays, something that would harm the security of the entire free world.
“Obviously, with those conditions, President Trump’s important vision could not be realized — the vision that would change the face of Gaza once and for all, and enable our state to live in security.”
“Therefore,” says Netanyahu, “I clarify: We will not end the ‘war of rebirth’ until we destroy Hamas in Gaza, until we return all of our hostages, and until we ensure that the Gaza Strip will not again constitute a threat to Israel.”
“Those in Israel who so irresponsibly call for an end to the war with a surrender to Hamas’s demands,” he charges,” are echoing Hamas propaganda… and fueling the cruel psychological war” that Hamas is fighting. “And they are putting off — not advancing — the release of the hostages.”
Hamas’s “surrender terms” are not new, he says. “But what Israeli leader could accept them after October 7? I certainly won’t. And I’m sure you wouldn’t either.”
He denounces what he terms calls to “surrender” to Hamas’s terms, which he says have grown of late — an apparent reference to a stream of letters urging that he prioritize the return of all the hostages even at the price of ending the war.
If he had heeded those calls, he says, Israel would not have entered Rafah, taken control of the Philadelphi Corridor, carried out the exploding pager attack on Hezbollah, killed Hamas’s leaders, created the conditions for the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, or dealt “the harsh blow” it has delivered to Iran. Instead, he says, Israel would have continued “to live under existential threat.”
The prime minister also rejects claims that Israel can trick Hamas into returning all the hostages and then return to war, and says the international community would not allow it and those advocating for such a tactic do not understand how international relations work.
The Times of Israel Community.