Netanyahu: I always believed ‘we could and would bring all our hostages home’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu begins his press conference this evening by asserting that he always believed all the hostages could be returned home from Gaza, “even in the face of pressures from both inside and out.”

“Yesterday we completed in full the sacred mission of bringing back all of our hostages,” he says a day after the return of the final hostage, Ran Gvili.

“I believed that through the combination of military pressure and diplomatic pressure we could — and would — bring all of our hostages home,” he says.

He adds: “What is more important in war than anything else is to ignore the background noise, to stand cool-headed in the face of pressures from within and from without, to understand what needs to be done and to pursue it with all one’s might — to achieve the objective.”

“Many generations will draw inspiration from Ran Gvili, a hero of Israel, and from all our other heroes, whose courage was revealed in all its glory in the War of Redemption,” he said, using his preferred term for the war triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre. “This is the generation of heroism. This is the generation of victory.”

Netanyahu thanks the IDF, Shin Bet, Israel Police, US President Donald Trump, and members of his government for their assistance in returning the hostages, naming former Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and hostage pointman Gal Hirsch — the latter of which he is jointly holding the press conference with — in particular.