Netanyahu says hoping hostage deal can be finalized ‘in a few days’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expresses optimism that a hostage release deal with Hamas can be sealed in the near future.

“I hope we can complete it in a few days,” he tells Newsmax’s Greta Van Susteren in an interview before flying back to Israel.

“We’ll probably have a 60-day ceasefire. Get the first batch out and then use the 60 days to try to negotiate an end to this,” he says on the last day of a four-day visit, during which he met US President Donald Trump twice. “And this could end tomorrow — today, if Hamas lays down its arms.”

“We think we can bring it to completion,” continues Netanyahu. “So I wouldn’t tell you that we have a war goal that is unachievable. We’re going to defeat these monsters and get our hostages back.”

Netanyahu gets the number of hostages taken on October 7 wrong, saying it was 255 instead of 251. Four hostages, two dead and two alive, were already held by Hamas at the time of the 2023 attack.

The premier says Hamas is using violence to prevent civilians from escaping combat zones in Gaza.

“It is a fighting force and a governing force in Gaza that oppresses its people, targets our people, our civilians, and uses their civilians as human shields,” says Netanyahu. “And then they complain that the civilian losses are because of us. No, we say to the civilians, ‘Leave. Leave the war zone.’ … And Hamas says, ‘You don’t go. You try to leave the war zone, we’ll shoot you.'”

“And they shoot them because they want the pictures of dead civilians that they are causing put on Israel’s head. And that’s what you get in TikTok and the social media: ‘Israel is deliberately killing civilians.’ No, we’re not. Hamas is deliberately killing its own people, preventing them from escaping the war zone. So they’re monsters.”

Netanyahu says that he sees signs that Hamas is cracking: “There are Palestinians fighting Hamas because we weaken them to this point. We see something that never happened before. Palestinians in Gaza are fighting Hamas. Palestinians in Gaza are defying Hamas. Palestinians in Gaza are saying, ‘We don’t want them We don’t want to be tyrannized and subjugated by these monsters.”

He says that working with Trump is “extraordinary.”

“Look at what our cooperation produces,” he says. “Look at what happens when there’s no daylight between an American president and an Israeli prime minister.”

Netanyahu says that he and Trump are “achieving a common doctrine. It’s called peace through strength. First comes strength, then comes the peace.”

“There are several countries waiting in the wings” to make peace, he also says.

He stresses that Iran also took hostages as one of the first acts of the Islamic Republic. “This is part of the Iranian doctrine. This is part of the Iranian evil axis.”