Netanyahu: Gazans relocated from Strip would be allowed back if they disavow terror
PM lauds Trump’s resettlement plan in interviews with friendly outlets, while largely snubbing Israeli press on 6-day trip to Washington; says proposal is ‘not ethnic cleansing’
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained that under US President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate Gazans Palestinians would eventually be able to return home after being screened, in a series of interviews aired Saturday.
“Give them an option to relocate temporarily while we rebuild the place physically and while we also rebuild it in terms of radicalization. You want to come back? You have to disavow terrorism, but you can come back,” he told Fox News’ Mark Levin in a pre-recorded interview that he gave during his six-day trip to Washington, DC.
In presenting his plan last week, Trump had initially said Palestinians would be permanently resettled, though his press secretary Karoline Leavitt quickly walked back the assertion, saying instead that Gazans should instead be “temporarily relocated” for the rebuilding process.
The interviews aired Saturday were all granted to media outlets that are friendly to the prime minister, while he avoided speaking to almost all accompanying Israeli journalists during the visit, which coincided with the fifth batch of hostages released from Gaza under a shaky truce deal with the Hamas terror group.
The prime minister and his wife, Sara, departed for Israel on Saturday night, Washington time, after a short delay due to ice on the airplane’s wings.
His wife joined him for the return flight, having spent over two months in the US. They were expected to land at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport late Sunday afternoon.
The main challenge with Trump’s plan, which was swiftly rejected by Arab and Western leaders, was where to send the Gazans, Netanyahu said.
Asked by Newsmax where Palestinians would be sent, the prime minister said, “That’s one of the important questions is, where do you find a country or countries that will take them? But I think the president and his team are working on that. That’s very important.”
Echoing his initial enthusiasm for the proposal, Netanyahu called Trump’s controversial plan the “first fresh idea in years,” telling Fox that it had “the potential to change everything in Gaza” and Newsmax’s Greta Van Susteren that it was a “fresh new idea.”
“President Trump always cuts to the chase,” he said, “and he gets to the point that people don’t even think about.”
“It’s the kind of thinking that brought us the Abraham Accords, when for 25 years we didn’t have a peace treaty. And then we said, ‘Well, we have to act differently; we wait for the Palestinians to agree, they’ll never agree.’ So we went around the Palestinians and made these four peace accords.”
Israel established relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, during Trump’s first term in office under the accords (Sudan also agreed to normalize ties, though that remains unratified).
Benjamin Netanyahu: "President Trump has not only been the greatest friend that Israel has had in the White House, and his administration has been doing incredible things for our alliance, but I think he's helping complete something that we begun." @netanyahu @greta pic.twitter.com/wDP69VX6ny
— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) February 8, 2025
Normalization efforts with Saudi Arabia, which did not join the 2020 accords and has never recognized Israel, have been all but shelved due to the war in Gaza as well as Riyadh’s demands that Israel establish a diplomatic horizon for a future Palestinian state.
Netanyahu insisted that the plan does not amount to “forcible eviction” from the Palestinian enclave, which has been heavily damaged by 15 months of war, sparked by Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023, onslaught on southern Israeli communities.
“Not ethnic cleansing. Getting out from what all these countries and all these do-gooders say is an open-air prison. Why do you want to keep them in prison?” he said.
The prime minister rejected what he called “misconceptions” about Trump’s proposal.
“[A] misconception that has been foisted on Trump’s vision is that America has to put troops [in Gaza] to defeat Hamas. Give me a break. I mean, we’re doing the job. We’re doing the heavy lifting. We don’t need any American troops. Nor did President Trump suggest that they do that,” he told Newsmax.
He also said that US taxpayer dollars would not be used to fund the project, saying of Trump, “He thinks there’ll be Arab countries who could do it, probably private contractors who could do it.”
To Fox News, Netanyahu denied that US special envoy Steve Witkoff had “muscled” him into the ongoing hostage release deal with Hamas: “We had a real, not only friendly, but eye-to-eye conversation, and what happened was, I accepted this deal months ago. Hamas refused the deal.”
The agreement is now in its 42-day first phase, during which 33 children, women and older men — not all of them alive — are supposed to be released from Gaza in exchange for almost 2,000 Palestinian terror convicts, including hundreds serving life sentences.
So far, 16 hostages have been returned under the deal signed in January, with three freed on Saturday while Netanyahu was still in the US. Five Thai hostages were also freed outside the framework of the accord.
Netanyahu sent an Israeli delegation to Doha on Saturday night to continue discussing the accord with mediators, though officials said discussions on the second stage of the deal would not begin until the security cabinet meets on Sunday.
Back in Israel, protesters across the country demanded that the government secure the release of all those still held captive by terror groups in Gaza, after Or Levy, Ohad Ben Ami and Eli Sharabi were released on Saturday morning looking emaciated, pale and frail.
Health officials were quoted as saying that the three were suffering from severe physical and mental deterioration, including malnutrition, decreased muscle mass, heart disorders, and prolonged infection.
Also in the foreign media interviews, the prime minister said that while he appreciated the “initial support” from Joe Biden’s administration early in the war, as pressure built on the former US president to change his position on Israel, the White House had said that if Israel goes into Rafah, “we’ll stop the weapons.”
According to the premier, some in his cabinet wanted to end the war in Gaza given the US opposition.
“If we become a vassal state, we will not survive,” he warned.
Netanyahu has most recently taken flak from his far-right coalition members over the deal with Hamas, with former national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party leaving the government over the agreement, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich threatening to follow suit with his Religious Zionism party if the war against the Palestinian terror group does not resume.
Trump’s Gaza plan was well-received by the ultranationalists, with Ben Gvir announcing this week that the odds of his party rejoining the coalition went up significantly in the wake of the call to resettle Palestinians outside of the Strip.
