And we're joined now by the Israeli Ambassador to the
US,
Michael Herzog. Welcome, Mr. Ambassador.
Good morning, Martha. John Finer seemed pretty hopeful in that
interview about
the sensitive nature clearly in the hostage negotiations.
But how would you describe it at this point?
We are hopeful that we can get a
significant, significant number of postages freed in the coming days.
I don't want to go into the details of these
talks.
They are obviously very sensitive.
The less we go into the details,
the better the chances of such a deal.
But they are very serious efforts and I'm hopeful that
we can have a deal in the coming days,
in the next few days.
The deal outlined in the post said it would involve
a freeze in combat operations for five days this week,
Prime Minister Netanyahu said a pause in combat is exactly
what Hamas wants so they can regroup.
So I want to distinguish within a pause for a
few days in order to get hostages released and a
ceasefire.
The Prime Minister was referring to a ceasefire,
and we're against a ceasefire
because that would allow Hamas to retain power,
to regroup, to rearm and strike again.
But it would be a ceasefire for a few days.
This is, is that the difference?
We're talking about pausing the fighting for a few days
so we can get the hostages out.
But also it's not a ceasefire because we will continue
to push against Hamas to dismantle their military infrastructure and
the terror infrastructure.
We're not going to stop that,
but we are willing to go for a pause for
a significant number of hostages
if we have a deal
and and tell me what the status is of the
military operation now.
We saw your forces go into Al Shifa hospital.
It's described as horrific conditions in there now premature babies
in in fear of death.
What should you be doing there and what are you
doing there?
We have very clear evidence that Hamas used Al Shifa
hospitals and other hospitals
as command and control centers and the hub for their
leaders and rockets and the
power generator for the tunnels.
And we already discovered evidence.
We're going to show more evidence today of tunnels.
We will show more evidence.
What kind of evidence can you show?
Because what you've shown so far does not necessarily mean
there was a command.
No. We we found, we found a lot of weapons.
We found computers. We found a lot of things.
We found tunnels. We're now searching these tunnels.
They're all booby trapped.
But we are in the process of searching these tunnels
and we show our findings to the world while we
were there.
We're still there. There's no shootout.
We're very careful. We have been in touch with the
managerial staff of the hospital,
with the manager. We allow people who wanted to evacuate
to evacuate.
Were they supposed to evacuate
too? No. There are other areas.
There are shelters, there are hubs.
There are hospitals in the South as well.
There are still as we speak and as our forces
are working underground,
there are patients being treated in that hospital and our
forces both fuel and incubators and all the babies are
going out
and the the the hospital continues to function but underneath
there is a city of terror and we're after it.
You, you have seen the numbers.
More than 12,000 civilians, more than
4500 children killed according to the Hamas run Gaza ministry.
Health Ministry Secretary Blinken says far too many civilians have
died.
You have said you're making every effort to distinguish between
terrorists and the civilian population.
And yet the world has seen those images,
those children, those civilians. So let me say every loss
of human life,
Israeli or Palestinian, is a tragedy.
We are not after innocent civilians.
We are after the terrorists who've been hiding behind civilians.
I'll be very careful about Hamas numbers.
All the numbers you hear coming out of Gaza or
Hamas numbers,
nobody really knows how many people die.
There's there's no denying that There is collateral damage of
the civilians died but nobody knows how many and you
and the collateral damage,
the children, you don't know and I don't know how
many of them are terrorists and how many of them
are civilians.
Nobody really knows. I can tell you that.
I certainly don't think the children are terrorists.
I never said that, never implied that and there are
children there.
But in the overall numbers,
I don't know and you don't know how many of
them are terrorists and how many of them
are innocent civilians. I will tell you that on October
7th,
those who went to Israel
3000 terrorists, we already we are still counting bodies of
terrorists in our side.
We have 1100 and Hamas counts there as people who
died in Gaza.
Mr. Besser, I want to,
I want to end here.
President Biden wrote an op-ed over the weekend making clear
what the US wants.
He said there must be no forcible displacement of Palestinians
from Gaza,
no reoccupation, no seizure blockade and no reduction in territory.
And after this war is over,
the voices of Palestinian people and their aspirations must be
at the center of post crisis governance in Gaza.
Can you commit to that?
I think there's no real daylight between US and the
US,
our forces not there in order to reoccupy Gaza,
to govern Gaza. It is not our desire.
It's not our wish. We not wish to
take territory from Gaza. That's not the intention.
Our intention is to dismantle the Hamas terror machine,
the war machine. And President Biden says it in his
article that we should dismantle lateral machine or else they
will strike again and again.
We are in a dialogue with the US administration about
the day after Hamas in Gaza.
And that includes a, of course,
the idea that Palestinians will govern over Palestinians.
Nobody else wants to do that.
OK. Thank you so much for joining us this morning,
Mr. Ambassador. Much thank you very much.