March 29, 2025 - Epoch Times
09:50
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Israel hasn't been in control of Gaza or wasn't in control of Gaza since 2005 when Israel withdrew lock, stock and barrel from Gaza. | |
| We expelled 8,500 Israelis who lived in flourishing communities in Gaza, in northern Gaza and along southern Gaza, along the area that Israel currently controls to prevent smuggling. | |
| And we withdrew them. | |
| We destroyed the communities. | |
| We withdrew all of our military forces, including from the international border between Gaza and Egypt. | |
| And we said, take over. | |
| Here's your Palestinian state. | |
| Why don't you turn this into Singapore? | |
| They were given billions and billions of dollars in international aid money from the United States, from other Western countries, and from the countries of the Middle East. | |
| And rather than do what we were hoping that they would do... | |
| Rather than turning Gaza into Singapore along the lines that President Trump has sort of laid out in his plan, in his vision for post-war Gaza, they turned Gaza into Afghanistan with 450 miles of subterranean tunnels that exist for the sole purpose of attacking Israel. | |
| They took all of the building materials, they took the money, and rather than build up, build Gaza up. | |
| They built an underground Gaza, the preconceived notion of which was to be used as the most entrenched enemy encampments and battle stations in history. | |
| You're talking about a regime of the Palestinians under Hamas that is dedicated solely not to the building of a state, but to the annihilation of the Jewish state. | |
| Everybody thought, everybody, so many people thought the consensus opinion of the international community led by the United States was just give them the opportunity. | |
| If you leave Gaza, if you give it to them, say, here, the first time ever that Palestinians have had full sovereignty over anything, there's never been a Palestinian state, they had all of Gaza built. | |
| You want a state? | |
| Start. Start here. | |
| Who knows where it will lead? | |
| But here, make your lives good. | |
| We're going to give you all of the ability to do that. | |
| Billions and billions of dollars. | |
| Israel left. | |
| It'll let you take your goods to market through Israel. | |
| If you want, you can build a port in Gaza. | |
| All of these things were on the table, being discussed. | |
| People were willing to fund them. | |
| And all of this stuff they took. | |
| And they built a death factory. | |
| And they indoctrinated their people not to want to build a state, but to want to annihilate the Jewish state. | |
| Is, given everything you've just told me, is it even possible to win this war somehow, militarily? | |
| Yes, it is. | |
| It's possible to win this war militarily by... | |
| A, destroying their ability to conduct war, which we mainly did. | |
| But now, I mean, what we're seeing now in terms of Hamas's reorganization as a military organization is much more along the lines of a guerrilla warfare operation than a standing army. | |
| It was a standing army that invaded Israel on October 7th. | |
| They had air cover with their missiles. | |
| They had drones. | |
| They had... | |
| And they had ground forces. | |
| They had a navy that invaded Israel from the beaches. | |
| And they were organized in brigade units that were centrally commanded by chief of staff of their military forces, Mohammed Def. | |
| So they had organized as a military force. | |
| And that military force was largely destroyed. | |
| And now we're facing more of a guerrilla organization. | |
| So from that perspective... | |
| We conducted a military operation that destroyed their military. | |
| And now we're going after them in a more of a counterterrorism offensive. | |
| The question of the way, the enmeshment of Hamas with the people of Gaza who share the same ideological... | |
| The same way, as Prime Minister Netanyahu said repeatedly, the German people became disabused of the notion that Nazism was going to get them somewhere good. | |
| And so by showing them that the only thing that they get from Being with Hamas is death and destruction. | |
| And giving them an alternative, which is what the Trump plan does, which is, you know, you have this opportunity to build a life in a different place. | |
| Gaza will be rebuilt. | |
| And, you know, you can return, if you're willing to sign onto this deal, to a place that is humane, that... | |
| That seeks peace, that wants a different future, that is building a different future, if you wish, and otherwise stay where you've relocated to, and that's how you achieve the goals of this war. | |
| You have to change the internal calculations so when you have a discourse that says, hey, Israel's guilty of genocide. | |
| Everything that Israel does is an illegal act. | |
| Israel isn't even the moral equivalent of Hamas. | |
| Israel is worse than Hamas. | |
| What kind of incentive are you giving the people of Gaza to walk away from Hamas? | |
| You're not. | |
| You're incentivizing them to stay with Hamas. | |
| You're rewarding their bad behavior by saying that the people that they just carried out a one-day holocaust against on October 7th and continue to aspire to do it over and over and over again, as they repeatedly claim. | |
| Or proclaim. | |
| You're saying, good for you. | |
| We appreciate you. | |
| We think what you're doing is fantastic. | |
| And we agree with you that the Jewish state is evil. | |
| So when you have that kind of discourse, you're not giving them any reason to walk away from this death factory. | |
| Let's talk briefly about the Trump plan, because when we first heard about it, there was a lot of sort of shock. | |
| What? A lot of people weren't even sure how this might actually work. | |
| Presumably that's been thought about in Israel to some extent. | |
| Why don't you give me a picture of where we're at with Trump's plan for Gaza and how much is the Netanyahu government aligned with that? | |
| The Netanyahu government is completely aligned with the Trump program. | |
| You know, look, it's new thinking, as the Prime Minister has said. | |
| You know, this is the first time that somebody has actually looked at the problem in a different way. | |
| When you're constantly looking at the issue in a manner of moral equivalence or the only thing that you can do is keep them there, there's no other alternative to doing the exact same thing that's failed for, you know, 100 years. | |
| Then you're going to always get the same result because you're not doing anything different. | |
| You're doing the same thing that brought us to this point. | |
| So President Trump looks at him and says, no, that's the problem. | |
| There has to be a different way. | |
| Let these people have another option. | |
| There was a Gallup poll that was put out. | |
| Ask them, are you interested in relocating? | |
| Over 50% of them said yes. | |
| I mean, why? | |
| Why not? | |
| Wouldn't anybody? | |
| I mean, you have over a million, many more than a million, I guess, Ukrainians who left their country during the war. | |
| You have over a million Syrians who left. | |
| You have over a million Iraqis who left. | |
| You have over a million Afghans who left. | |
| I mean, people leave war zones. | |
| They want to go somewhere else and build a future. | |
| It's the same thing with the Palestinians. | |
| They've just been blocked. | |
| The prime minister said they call Gaza an... | |
| An outdoor prison. | |
| But they're being imprisoned by Egypt, and you could say by the nations of the world who support the idea that Egypt put forward, that they're not allowed to leave. | |
| By keeping them in, that's what turns it into a prison. | |
| If you let them out, then it wouldn't be one anymore. | |
| And even just giving them the option of leaving means that it's not a prison anymore and people can breathe in a different way when they know that they have an out. | |
| It's like a safety valve that you open it up and you let people feel like they have an alternative to what they're doing and the whole world looks different. | |
| Well, people will say, of course, but they can't leave to Israel. | |
| They can leave through Israel. | |
| I mean, if we, you know, we would let them leave by sea through the Ashdod port or by air through the Ramon airfield, you know, if they have a place to go, certainly they would be allowed out. | |
| But, you know, in the middle of the war, and, you know, the truth is that when, before Israel took over the Rafah crossing, the crossing between Egypt and Gaza, 130,000 of them left. | |
| They had to pay, you know, bribes or whatever to Egyptian border guards, $10,000 per person. | |
| 5,000, I think, for kids. | |
| They paid, and they left. | |
| They have over 130,000, I think, in Egypt, or in third countries that left. | |
| So people who had money left, give them the option. | |
| And over 150,000 left in the years preceding October 7th. | |
| So just let them make their own decision. |
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