“I think Israel will — indefinitely — bear overall responsibility for the security of Gaza because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t — an explosion of Hamas terror on a scale we couldn’t have imagined,” said he ABC News. .

This view has been expressed in recent weeks by Israeli officials on the condition of anonymity, but Netanyahu is stating it directly.

Asked if he would agree to US President Joe Biden’s request for humanitarian pauses, Netanyahu initially avoided answering, but when pressed by a journalist, offered for the first time more flexibility on the issue.

“There were mostly small breaks – an hour here, an hour there. We will check the circumstances [pentru a avea pauze suplimentare] to allow humanitarian shipments to enter or hostages to leave,” Netanyahu added, becoming the first Israeli official to confirm that Jerusalem had agreed to a temporary pause.

Netanyahu also said he would agree to a ceasefire if Hamas released all of the approximately 240 hostages held in Gaza. “It would be a ceasefire and we are waiting for that to happen. This did not happen before,” he says.

The prime minister says Israel has information about where the hostages are, but refuses to elaborate.

Asked if the ongoing ground operation was putting the lives of the hostages at risk, Netanyahu said: “We are looking into it,” while asserting that “until we started the ground operation, there was no pressure on them to release the hostages. What we saw when we started on the ground is that there is pressure.”

It is unclear what kind of pressure Netanyahu was referring to, given that only four hostages released by Hamas were released before Israel launched its ground invasion on October 27.

The prime minister also said Israel would do everything it could to limit civilian casualties, but acknowledged that this was not always possible due to the terrorist group’s use of human shields.

Pressed on whether he should take responsibility for what happened on October 7, as other Israeli leaders have done, Netanyahu avoids answering the question directly.

“I said that there will be very tough questions and I will be one of the first to answer them. We will not bypass it. It is the government’s responsibility to protect the people, and it is clear that this responsibility has not been met,” he says.