Netanyahu: ‘We Are On the Way to Complete Victory’

JERUSALEM, Israel — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday evening that Israel would achieve complete victory over Hamas within months, not years.

“Tonight, I have come to tell you one thing: we are on the way to complete victory,” he said at the start of a press conference from the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.

As he has done in previous briefings, Netanyahu began by reading the words of family members of fallen soldiers who insisted that the military should press forward to its goal of destroying Hamas, so that their loved ones would not have died in vain.

Netanyahu spoke hours after the public learned details of Hamas’s counteroffer for a new hostage deal. Hamas proposed a multi-stage process in which Israel would have to end the war, short of victory, before receiving all of its abducted citizens and soldiers.

Moreover, Hamas reportedly made a variety of demands, including the release of thousands of Palestinian terrorists, the provision of hundreds more trucks in faily aid, and an Israeli commitment to provide water and electricity for rebuilding Gaza.

Netanyahu commented that he had met earlier in the day with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was due to hold his own press conference 45 minutes later. Netanyahu said he had made clear that any discussion of “the day after” the war would have to mean “the day after Hamas.” Israel would not permit any part of the organization to survive, he said, and would insist on complete freedom for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to operate in Gaza to protect Israelis, regardless of who governed there.

In the question-and-answer period, Netanyahu stressed that Israeli victory over Hamas would improve the prospects of good relations with Arab states, implying that defeat would signal weakness and discourage Arab states from cooperating with Israel.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.