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April 5, 2025 - Epoch Times
24:23
How Hamas Turned Gaza into a Death Factory: Netanyahu Adviser Caroline Glick
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The discussion that we've had about the war is just sort of blind to the basic realities of the situation and that to me is the ground zero of all of the problems.
Caroline Glick is a journalist, author, and recently advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
By showing them that the only thing that they get She breaks down Israel's perspective on various developments in the region, from resuming wartime operations in Gaza to the situation in Syria, to Trump's strikes on the Houthis in Yemen.
When somebody tells you that they want to kill you, you have to believe them.
You have no choice.
You have to take them at their word.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Caroline Glick, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Oh, it's a pleasure to be on your program, Jan.
So, Israel has resumed war activity in Gaza.
There's different narratives around why that's happened.
Explain to me from the perspective of Israel what's going on.
So the proximate cause of the reinstatement of military operations in Gaza is that Hamas broke the ceasefire.
We had a ceasefire where they got respite in the sense of a ceasefire and removal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip except for the perimeter around Israel and the border zone with Egypt so that they don't control...
...smuggling routes for weapons and personnel, and they were supposed to return the hostages that they're still holding.
They took 251 hostages on October 7th, 210 live hostages from Israel in an act of sadism and war crimes.
Unseen before.
And they continue to hold 59 hostages, 25 of whom are alive.
And they refuse to give them up.
During the course of this ceasefire, we were able to secure the release of several hostages, of many hostages, in exchange for releasing hundreds of terrorists from our prisons in Israel.
And they were supposed to continue along with this.
And we were waiting and waiting.
Ambassador Whitcoff, the president's special envoy for handling the hostages issue from the American perspective, had offered a compromise to prolong the ceasefire, where they would give us 10 more live hostages and about an equal number of deceased hostages who they murdered in exchange for continue along on the ceasefire.
And they rejected it.
And still they got an extra two weeks of ceasefire sort of as a freebie because Israel was waiting for them to agree to release more hostages.
And they refused.
And so we realized that...
That the longer that we prolonged it, the longer they felt that they weren't going to have to pay any price for continuing to hold the hostages.
And so right now, as Prime Minister Netanyahu said, we're going to continue to conduct the hostage negotiations, but under fire.
Because doing it during a ceasefire wasn't bringing about the release of any more hostages.
So we're restoring our control over...
What's called the Netzerim Corridor, which sort of cuts Gaza in half from north to south to prevent the movement of terrorists and the receding of Hamas and all of the areas that they've seized control over again since the IDF removed its forces from Gaza at the beginning of the hostage deal in late January.
And so that's where we are right now.
We have two goals in this war, or three really, but I mean two immediate goals.
One is the release of all of the hostages and the other is the destruction of Hamas as a military What is the third?
Okay, that's something I definitely want to ask you about.
But going back to the military operations, there were reports of, I think, 400 Gazans who had been...
...killed very quickly.
Seems like a large number.
There's concerns that this is too...
Too hard of a strike?
I don't know.
We hear a lot about this.
What's your reaction?
So first of all, I think it's very important to note that Israel doesn't deliberately target civilians.
That's what Hamas does.
That's why we're in this war, because they deliberately targeted civilians on October 7th when they invaded Israel.
You know, you had over 75% of the casualties that day of the 1,400 people that they murdered were civilians.
It was deliberate targeting of families, of women who were subjected to mass brutal rape, gang rape, children who were murdered in front of their parents, parents who were murdered in front of their children, immolation, burning alive of families.
There were over 800 civilians who were murdered out of 1,200 people who were killed.
And the rest were military personnel, and they were mainly not engaged in combat.
They were in their beds.
They were butchered in their beds.
And also the female soldiers who they murdered were brutally raped.
So we don't do that.
And the numbers that we've seen, by the way, of the dead, you know, these all come from Hamas.
And they use these kinds of numbers which have been largely debunked by studies like the University of Pennsylvania put out of a study at the height of the combat operations last year that showed that the numbers that the Hamas health ministry in Gaza are putting out are faked.
So we've seen a lot of these things, but because they...
remain the regime in Gaza.
They remain in control of the health ministry in Gaza.
So you keep getting these numbers and they're automatic numbers.
You know, at the beginning of the war, there were reports that a missile had fallen on Al-Ali Hospital in Gaza.
And they claimed, I don't remember what it was, something like 500 dead five minutes after a missile fell in the parking lot of this hotel.
But there were already 500 dead ten minutes later.
Nobody knows these numbers.
It took us weeks and weeks and weeks to figure out how many people they killed on October 7th because they immolated the bodies.
that burn people alive.
There were bodies that took months to identify through broken teeth shards.
And so we didn't know, but they know there are 523 people dead within 10 minutes.
And it worked out it was a missile that was shot into Israel by the Islamic Jihad terrorists who work with Hamas that had fallen short of its target inside of Gaza.
And, you know, how many casualties there were, who knows.
But in the meantime, you've had three news cycles going out across the world saying that Israel is deliberately targeting sick people, wounded people in this Gaza hospital.
It wasn't our missile.
Nobody knows how many were killed.
Probably very few.
But this was sort of the thing that happened every day, you know, by their own statistics, like you'd think that.
But again, Israel doesn't target civilians.
Hamas does.
And every act of war that they carry out against Israel because they hide behind civilians is actually, under international law, a war crime.
You can test these numbers, and I understand why, based on what you just said.
What would be other misconceptions that you deal with in your role regularly that you I mean, there's this very strange moral equivalence that people make between the State of Israel and Hamas terrorists.
And so I think that in a lot of ways, this moral equivalence, which is fundamentally fraudulent, there is no equivalence.
We're fundamentally different societies.
We're fundamentally different types of people in the way that we view the sanctity of life.
We view it as sacred.
They view death as sacred.
I mean, this fundamental disparity between Israel and people who are aligned more with the Muslim Brotherhood view of jihadist Islam is really like light and darkness, like day and night.
And it's very difficult as a practical matter to be blind to that disparity and then have a rational discussion about the war.
So I think that when you look at sort of the grounding assumptions on which the entire discourse of the war is predicated, and you realize that they're fundamentally flawed from a moral perspective and from a practical perspective, then you understand that a lot of the discussion that we've had about the war itself is just sort of blind to the basic realities of the situation, and that to me is...
The ground zero of all of the problems in the discourse about the war.
We don't want to kill people.
We don't want to be at war with our neighbors.
We're peace-seeking people.
We've done even silly things, even stupid things, even irresponsible things in our ardent desire to live at peace with our neighbors.
It's all we ever want is peace.
And on the other hand, they teach their children that their greatest aspiration should be the annihilation of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.
We need to fight against all Jews in the land, in the first place and in the last place.
We are all in the peace and the peace and the peace.
Our soldiers in Gaza, they come in in the height of the war last year.
They were entering into these apartment buildings.
And I remember this one, and it wasn't rare.
It happens every day.
You have pictures of Mein Kampf, copies of Mein Kampf.
You have all of this Nazi literature, all of this annihilationist, anti-Semitic literature, posters, etc.
And they found an iPad that belonged to a teenage girl.
You know, in this apartment.
And they turned it on, and her screensaver was Adolf Hitler.
I have teenage boys, you know, and they're interested in all kinds of things.
I have one boy who loves the NFL and everything is NFL, and the other one loves soccer and everything is messy, messy, messy.
Who would think of putting Adolf Hitler as their screensaver?
But I mean, it's indicative of the nature of a society that's been deformed by indoctrination and constant drumbeat of annihilationist hatred of Jewish people and of Western civilization that they get everywhere in Gaza.
When you internalize that, and anybody looking at what happened on October 7th, really, it's like, how could you not see that?
The whole discussion of the war seems irrelevant to actual realities on the ground.
You know, let me tell you how I've heard it described.
Israel has been so dominant and so destructive and so, some people have even used the term genocidal, right, towards the Gazan people.
That's the reason that there might be a Hitler screensaver.
Or something like that.
How do you respond to that?
This is fundamentally false.
If we're genocidal, we're the worst conductors of genocide ever because the data speak for themselves.
The actual data speak for themselves.
You have the head of urban warfare at West Point, Colonel John Spencer, who has put out report after report attesting to the fact that the casualty rate in Gaza Of civilians to military personnel is the lowest in recorded history.
The lowest.
I mean, you've never had anything like that in an urban warfare situation.
The numbers are almost impossible to get your head around.
The lengths that Israel goes to to protect civilians in Gaza are unprecedented in the history of warfare.
And it doesn't matter because the discourse has an intrinsic logic of moral equivalence.
Look at what we're doing.
We're sending out leaflets.
Leave, we're going to start bombing.
We've made millions of phone calls to people on their cell phones saying, leave where you are right now.
Go to a safe area so that you're not harmed.
We set up humanitarian safe zones throughout Gaza.
We have to do that because the Egyptians blocked the Gazans from fleeing the war zone.
You have millions of people flee every war zone.
But thanks to the Egyptians, the Gazans have been boxed in and not allowed to flee.
So Israel instead has set up, you know, at extraordinary cost, these humanitarian safe zones for the people of Gaza so that they'll be kept out of harm's way.
They did it before the operation in Rafah.
Everybody said it couldn't be done.
1.4 million civilians in Rafah.
How can you go in there?
Well, we moved them out.
You know, Prime Minister Netanyahu constantly has been...
Showing the data in all of his statements, not only to the media, but also to visiting people who are concerned about these kinds of things that you're talking about.
And yet the discourse continues apace.
The facts be damned.
There is no truth whatsoever to these allegations.
And at a certain point, you have to wonder, well, facts don't matter.
People don't care.
People aren't looking at the actual number.
They're not looking at the actions that Israel has taken to prevent civilian deaths, and they're just asserting these slanderous allegations time after time after time.
And you're wondering, you know, what is motivating this?
How can it be?
That you have these so-called humanitarian organizations, international organizations, media organizations that are just parroting these slanders.
They're just unsupported entirely by fact.
Caroline, one quick sec.
We're going to take a break.
And folks, we'll be right back.
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I can't stress how highly I appreciate this show and how much I think you will love it.
And we're back with Caroline Glick, advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Maybe there's another nuance here, which is that it's just quite simply, you know, Israel has been in control of the area for a long time and has been able to impose its will.
On the area in some significant manner.
And that is the problem, right?
That's unfair.
That's unreasonable.
Well, that's how it's characterized.
Right, right.
But it's not true.
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?
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.
And 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, 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 ground forces.
They had a navy that invaded Israel from the beaches.
And they were organized in brigade 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...
Well, how do you do that?
I mean, the same way as Prime Minister Netanyahu said repeatedly that 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 on to this deal, to a place that is humane.
...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 calculation 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.
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.
Well, Caroline Glick, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here, and I've been a long fan of your work, Jan.
I think you're doing extraordinary things here, and I congratulate you and Epoch Times and all your colleagues.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining Caroline Glick and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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