From the Liveblog of
Friday, August 23, 2024
‘What deal?’: In meeting with released hostages, Netanyahu denies torpedoing deal with Hamas
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defends his failure to close a hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas, during a meeting earlier today with four women kidnapped by the terror group on October 7 and released last year.
In leaked recordings from the meeting broadcast by Channel 12 news, Netanyahu repeatedly asks the former hostages, “What deal? Which deal?” when they push him on why he wasn’t able to secure an agreement before dozens were killed in captivity.
Later, a former hostage exclaims: “And they’re dying and every day you’re killing someone else.”
Netanyahu: “Whoever told you that there was a [hostage-ceasefire] deal on the table and that we didn’t take it for this reason or that reason, for personal reasons, it’s just a lie.”
In between outbursts of dissatisfaction from the group, Netanyahu asks them, “Another important thing… I’m trying to come to a deal that will maximize the number of hostages released, I won’t do it for 12 … because I’d just be leaving people there who are sick, who are elderly, the devil only knows. Would you do a thing like that? I won’t.”
It is believed that 105 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of 34 confirmed dead by the IDF.
At another point in the meeting, one of the former hostages, all of whom have relatives who are still held in Gaza, cries, “I don’t want humanitarian aid to get to them, I want the hostages here!”
To which Netanyahu quips, “There are many things we want and they’re hard to get, for example, I’d like to walk to Italy on foot in a straight line… so if that’s what we need to do it means drying up the ocean, so ‘let’s dry up the ocean, what’s the problem'”?
The prime minister’s wife Sara Netanyahu was also present at the meeting and also can be heard verbally sparring with the former hostages in the recordings released by Channel 12.
She claims she is constantly misquoted and slandered, and that this never happened before she was married to the prime minister.
Sara Netanyahu: “I was Sara Ben Arzi and no one told lies about me. I lived a normal life.”
A former hostage interrupts, “I also lived a normal live until I was kidnapped with my partner.”
The hostages were kidnapped on October 7, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst across the border into Israel by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages, mostly civilians, many amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
Hamas released 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November, and four hostages were released before that. Seven hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 30 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
