Netanyahu: Hamas without aid like a "fish without water"

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained the rationale of his and President Trump's independent aid program in a speech today (Tuesday) before the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Conference.

In his speech, he said that "That’s the current fad, the current lie. Well, that’s false too. From day one, or the early days of the war, we decided on a policy: we’re going after Hamas, we’re not going after the civilian population. Both in allowing it to leave the theaters of combat but also with supplying them with essential requirements: food, water, medicine. That’s what international law and common sense requires. So we did. So we supplied them with 1.8 million tons, 1.8 million tons of food and aid. That’s an enormous amount. And that’s why people didn’t…you didn’t have mass starvation at all. In fact, I’ll give you one simple indication of that."

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"So what happened? As we were supplying these aid trucks, Hamas looted them. They took a good chunk for themselves and the remainder they sold to the civilian population at exorbitant prices. And thereby, they funded their own recruits, new recruits because we were able to kill a lot of terrorists. They have to replenish their war machine, their terrorist machine, their terrorist army. So they used the aid to continue the war. And we said, that has to stop. And in the last ceasefire, which we got the hostages which I’ll talk about in a minute, we had…we made a decision: let us put the aid in such a way that we separate the aid from Hamas.

"We give it to the civilians and not to the terrorists. And we worked out a plan with our American friends to have controlled distribution sites where an American company would distribute the food to Palestinian families. It’s not a truck with flour bags, it’s a package for food for a family for a week. You come and you get it. It’s very hard for Hamas to steal it, especially because we guard these positions. Well, we tried the first one, we’re going to put many today. There was some loss of control momentarily happening. We brought it back under control. We’re going to put many more of these. And the idea is basically to take away the humanitarian looting as a tool of war of Hamas to give it to the population. Eventually to have a sterile zone in the south of Gaza where the entire population can move for its own protection.

"And then we basically, how shall I say this? We leave the fish without the water. We leave the Hamas terrorists without the tool for governance which they use, and that’s basically, that’s basically…sorry, the humanitarian aid that they loot. "