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Netanyahu spokesman: ‘We cannot return all of the hostages right now’

Omer Dostri: “The prime minister returned 196 hostages, 147 of whom are alive. We are doing everything to return the remaining hostages, both the living and the dead.”

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

During an interview on Saturday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman, Omer Dostri, said that returning all the Israeli hostages held captive by Hamas at one time is currently “impossible” because the terrorist group will only agree to do so if Israel ends the war.

On the “Meet the Press” program on the Israeli Channel 12 TV network, Dostri said, “It is impossible to return everyone right now. We are dealing with a neo-Nazi regime with a murderous terrorist organization. We need to destroy it, to make sure that they don’t do October 7 to us again. There are still hostages in Gaza, so the fighting is still limited. I don’t think there is anyone who doesn’t want to return our hostages.

“The prime minister returned 196 hostages, 147 of whom are alive. We are doing everything to return the remaining hostages, both the living and the dead. As soon as we return everyone, then we will destroy Hamas.”

Dostri dismissed the argument that Israel could negotiate a deal that would see the release of all of the hostages at one time as “just spin.”

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“It is currently impossible to make a single deal of ‘all for all’, because Hamas demands an end to the war and the withdrawal from Gaza. We say that we are sticking to the [US envoy Steve] Witkoff outline, meaning that on the first day we receive half of the live abductees and other dead abductees – and on the last day the rest,” he said.

On Saturday night, following Hamas’s rejection of the latest version of a hostage release deal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “I will not surrender to murderers.”

“I will not give in to the murderers who carried out the worst massacre since the Holocaust,” he said, referring to Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, when the terror group murdered 1,200 and took 250 hostages.

“Surrender would put the public at risk. If we meet their demands, everything we’ve worked so hard to achieve would be undone,” Netanyahu said.

“I’m fully committed to bringing our hostages home, but not by surrendering to Hamas’s terms,” he said.